Black and grey realism tattoo of a skull, a pocket watch held in a hand and a rose on a forearm, shown in two photographs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull, pocket watch and rose on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large skull sits at the top of the design, with a pocket watch held in a hand below it and a rose and scrollwork to the side. The shading is smooth and detailed, using soft greys and dark shadows to give the skull, watch face and fingers depth. The design is entirely in black and grey ink and is shown from two angles across the forearm.

Realism Forearm Skull Pocket watch Clock face Hand Rose Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the hard January the river froze up to the bridge, Maud Harrow kept her husband's pocket watch on the kitchen dresser and would not let anyone wind it. Tobias had carried it forty years in his waistcoat. When the fever took him in the week before Candlemas, the watch stopped at ten past four, the hour he always sat down to his tea.

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The neighbours came with pies and advice. Old Gil from the lower field said Death was a patient man who came to the door at the hour of your last winding, and that if you held the watch in your palm he would have to wait on the step. Maud did not believe him, but she held it anyway each night beside the banked fire, cupped in her hand, and listened to it tick against her own pulse.

In February the fox got into the hen house and the snow came up to the sills. One dark evening a knock came, slow and unhurried, and a thin man in a coat too big for him stood on the step. He had a pale face and a faded rose pinned at his lapel. "Only the time, ma'am," he said. "I've come for what's owed." Maud told him Tobias had paid his debts. The man said the watch was not Tobias's to pay with. It belonged to the hours he had been given, and those had run out.

Maud looked at the watch in her palm, then at the rose on his coat, and she said, "Then you'll have to take it from my hand, and I'll not open it for you." She closed her fingers. The knock did not come again. In the morning the fox was back among the drifts and the snow had slid off the sill. When at last she wound the watch, it kept good time until spring, and she spent that spring planting roses along the wall, where she could see them from the window.