Pencil-style drawing of a sparrow perched on a blossom branch beside an ornate pocket watch, scrollwork and key, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Sparrow, blossom and pocket watch design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A realistic pencil drawing of a sparrow perched on a branch with five-petalled blossoms, shown in side profile with detailed feather shading. Beside it sits an open pocket watch with engraved Roman numerals, decorative scrollwork and a twisted chain ending in a small key. The design is rendered in greyscale on a plain white background with soft shading and fine linework.

Realism Botanical Bird Blossom Branch Pocket watch Clock Chain Key Scrollwork

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch had stopped at twenty to four, and three repairers in Hebden Bridge had told Nell Pardoe the same thing: the mainspring was gone, and the movement was not worth the cost of a new one. She laid it on her late uncle's bench beside the window, where the cherry tree was in full blossom and the chain lay coiled among his needles and oil bottles.

Keep reading

A sparrow came down onto the branch every morning at the same hour, a brown cock with a black bib, and it sat there as if it owned the view. Nell began leaving crumbs on the sill. The petals drifted onto the pavement, and the postman kept treading them into the step, so that by the end of the week the shop smelled faintly of sweet rot and rain.

The little key on the chain fitted nothing she tried. Not the drawers of the cabinet, not the tin trunk under the stairs, not the padlock on the coal shed. She turned it over and over until its teeth were printed on her thumb. On the seventh morning she noticed a tiny square hole under the crown that she had always taken for a dust cap, and when she pressed the key into it, it turned with a click like a breath let go.

She wound the watch slowly, the way her uncle had taught her, and set the hands to twenty past eight. Outside, the sparrow dropped to the step and worried at the last petal, then flew off up the hill. In the shop the second hand began its small, sure walk round the dial.