Black and grey realism tattoo of a skull, roses, leaves and a pocket watch on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull, roses and pocket watch on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo covers the outer thigh, with a shaded human skull at the centre surrounded by several roses in varying stages of bloom. A pocket watch with a visible clock face sits low in the composition, with leaves filling the gaps between the flowers. The work is rendered in black and grey with smooth gradients and fine detail, and the subject is framed by the wearer's hands and loose clothing at the top of the image.

Realism Thigh Skull Rose Pocket watch Clock Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pocket watch had stopped at twenty past four, which Dessa said was the only honest thing her father ever left her. We were forty miles past the last filling station on the Dry Hollow road, the tarmac shivering ahead of us like something spilt, and she held the watch up to the window as if it might tell us how far we had left.

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He had driven this stretch every spring with a truck full of cut roses bound for the funeral parlours in Ashgrove, and he kept the watch on the dashboard so he could time his deliveries. Roses don't keep out here, he used to say. You sell them by the afternoon or you give them to the crows. By the time he reached the coast the petals had gone to paper, and Dessa remembered the sweet rot smell more than anything else about him.

At the bend where the saguaros thin out, she asked me to stop. We sat on the bonnet while the engine ticked as it cooled, and she wound the watch with a small brass key from her purse. The hands jumped, then began their slow walk round the face, and neither of us mentioned how the road had been waiting for us all along.

We drove on until the fuel needle hit a quarter, then turned back toward Ashgrove with the windows down. At the cemetery gate she laid three roses on the wall, heads already drooping, and set the watch beside them facing the sun. When we pulled away the watch was still going, and for once the hands were keeping pace with us.