Pencil drawing of a steampunk sleeve design with a pocket watch, gears, pipes and roses in black and grey linework.

Steampunk clockwork sleeve design with roses

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A tall vertical pencil drawing of a steampunk sleeve design. A pocket watch with Roman numerals sits at the top, surrounded by interlocking cogs, pipes, valves, dials and three large roses spaced down the length of the design. The shading is black and grey, built from fine pencil hatching and dense darker areas in the gears, with the composition running from top to bottom.

Traditional Pocket watch Gear Cog Rose Pipe Clock Mechanical

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

They said the watch in Marra's flour sack ran on bones, not brass, which was why it never stopped. She had carried it three days down the salt road from Edge Wells, past the dead windmill and the shrine with no name, because the old man in the last town had paid her in water and asked her to take it to the coast. He did not say why. He wound it once, slowly, the way you would close a dying man's eyes, and told her not to open the lid until she reached the sea.

Keep reading

On the fourth morning the road split into three and none of them had a sign. A rider came up out of the heat on a grey mule, a woman with cog-wheels stitched onto her coat and dried roses pressed flat inside her hat. She asked for the watch. Marra said no. The rider laughed, not unkindly, and pointed at the sack, which was humming now like a kettle about to sing. 'It is counting you,' the rider said. 'Every mile you walk, it takes one back for the next traveller.'

Marra sat down on the hot ground and opened the lid. Inside, the wheels turned beneath a face of Roman numerals, and beside them lay a little heap of brass valves and cut roses, dry and perfect. She understood then that the watch had been keeping the road honest for longer than the road had had a name. She shut the lid and set it on a stone, and the rider lifted it, nodded, and rode off towards all three roads at once.

Marra walked the rest of the way to the coast with an empty sack over her shoulder. The old men on the salt flats still tell it this way: a clock never leaves a desert without leaving something behind, and if you listen at the crossroads at noon, you can hear the gears still ticking, patient as a debt.