Colour traditional sleeve on a woman's arm, showing a pocket watch, red roses and a grey bird on the upper arm and forearm.

Traditional sleeve with pocket watch and roses

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A woman with green hair is shown from the chest down, with her arm folded across her body to display a traditional tattoo sleeve. The design includes a pocket watch on the forearm, red roses with green leaves, and a grey bird on the upper arm, with bold black outlines. Red, yellow and green ink sit alongside grey shading, and the framing is a close indoor phone photo.

Traditional Upper arm Forearm Pocket watch Rose Bird Sleeve Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abernethy's pocket watch had stopped at twenty past four the morning the rooks left the church tower. Tom Pryor, who mended clocks above the bakery on Mill Lane, said he could have it ticking by teatime. She set it on his bench beside a jar of wilting red roses and said it had never once been wrong, only sulky.

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He thumbed the case open and found the mainspring coiled tight, the balance wheel still, and nothing broken. Folded behind the dial was a slip of paper in a hand so small he needed the lamp to read it: Wind me when the crow comes back. On the gutter outside, a carrion crow had sat all week, black as a bad penny, watching him with one eye and then the other.

On Thursday the crow dropped onto the sill as if it had heard the bell. Tom gave the crown a quarter turn, then another, and the wheel took up its tick with a sound like a small heart remembering itself. Mrs Abernethy came for it at closing, her gloves smelling of cut stems, and she didn't ask what it cost.

"He used to wind it for me," she said, and held it to her ear as if it might say something back. Tom looked at the roses, then at the crow, which had gone very still, and decided that some hours were not his to fix. When she left, the jar was empty, and the crow had taken one red petal with it across the rooftops.