Close-up of a colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a watch face with splashes, numbers and stars on the inside of a forearm near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watch face and colour splashes on a wrist

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a watch face with a black strap wrapping the wrist, surrounded by loose splashes and drips of blue, red, purple and yellow. Numbers, small stars and a triangle float among the splashes, and the watch face is drawn with defined dark linework. The colour is bright and blended softly, and the design fills the wrist and lower forearm with the arm running diagonally through the frame.

Forearm Watch Splash Number Star Triangle Drip

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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

Mrs Pellow kept a brass watch on the hall shelf of her boarding house at Porthkerris, and it had stopped the winter the lodger Emrys Vosper came down from Bristol with a box of paints and no rent money. He offered to paint the damp off the parlour wall instead. Mrs Pellow let him, because the wall was ugly and he was cheap.

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He painted the sea, and when it was finished the sea would not stay on the wall. Blue ran down in threads and pooled on the skirting. Red drips slid off the picture frames. Each morning the boarders found the stains wider and more like the weather. Emrys said the paint wanted time, so he sat up at night with the watch in his lap, winding it with a key he had found in the rain gutter.

On the ninth night the hands turned backwards. The numbers came loose from the dial one at a time, a nine, then an eight, then a small star, and they floated out through the parlour door into the lane. Mrs Pellow followed them down to the harbour wall, where the tide was coming in with a sound like someone counting. Every number dropped into a splash and went under.

Emrys never painted again. Mrs Pellow kept the watch wound, and it kept good time after that, but the sea on her parlour wall had lost its colour. When the spray came over the front wall in March, the drips ran back up the plaster towards the window, as though they had somewhere to be.