Traditional colour tattoo of a sailing ship and lighthouse inside a pocket watch frame, with a red flower and black anchor, on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ship in a pocket watch with flower and anchor

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A circular pocket watch frame with a chain hangs above a black anchor, enclosing a scene of a sailing ship, a lighthouse, clouds and a blue sea. Bold black outlines and solid fills define the shapes, with a red flower and green leaves beside the watch and partial red and green designs visible at the edges. Bright primary colours dominate against the bare skin, and the design is framed centrally with the watch as the focal point.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clockmaker's daughter had never seen the sea, so when the carrier came to Harrowgate with his cart and a sack of letters, she asked him to bring her back something that kept time. He said the sea kept no time at all, only tides, and she said that was why she wanted it.

Keep reading

He came back the next spring with a brass case no bigger than a bramble berry. Inside the lid, someone had painted a ship with three sails filled, a lighthouse on a green finger of land, and clouds stacked like unwashed wool over water the blue of a jay's wing. She wound the watch every morning and looked at the ship before she looked at the hour.

When the carrier's cart went down into the flood at Dunsey Ford, the letters were lost and the watch was found caught in the reeds with its chain wrapped twice round a rusted anchor that was not his. The clockmaker's daughter said that was a poor exchange, and kept the anchor on the windowsill to hold the door open. The watch she wound every morning, and it still told the hour, though the hour had never once matched the sea.

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