Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a wristwatch with paint splashes and drips across the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour splash and watch on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm and wrist showing a tattoo of a wristwatch with a dark strap, its face drawn with clock hands and small markings. Loose splashes and drips in blue, red, orange and purple spread up the forearm behind the watch, giving a painted, watercolour effect. The composition is centred on the wrist, with a blurred mural of a face in the background.

Forearm Watch Clock Watercolour Splash Star

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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

Nobody brings a watch to Hollis and Daughter in a thunderstorm unless it has stopped for a reason. This one came wrapped in a tea towel still damp with linseed, and the man who set it on my bench would not give his name. He only said the hands had gone backwards twice before giving up at ten past four, and that he wanted it running by morning.

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I opened the case with the cheese knife my father used for forty years. The dial was streaked like a shop window after rain: ultramarine running into a crimson that had dried in ridges, orange flecks stuck to the minute hand, a purple thread crawling across the numerals. Someone had dipped the whole thing in a jar of colour and then tried to rescue it. The mainspring was sound. Three teeth were sheared off the escape wheel, as though something had been forced between them in a hurry.

I spent two nights at it. On the second, with the lamp hot against my cheek, I found a five-pointed star scratched inside the caseback, and beneath it, in pencil so faint I needed the glass, the words Meet me at the pier. No date, no name. I thought about the blues and reds bleeding down the dial, and how they looked like the sky over the harbour the evening my father first took me down to watch the boats come in.

The watch ran again at four in the morning. I wound it, set it against the wall clock, and sat with my tea going cold. When the man came back at nine he asked what he owed, and I told him the paint was not mine to take off, so he could keep the splashes and pay me for the teeth. He laughed, then looked at the second hand sweeping across that bright blue smear, and said nothing at all.