Black and grey realism tattoo of a winged pocket watch with Roman numerals, a rose and rays on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged pocket watch with rose and rays

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A pocket watch with Roman numerals and a ribbon-like strap sits at the centre, with feathered wings behind it and a shaded rose below. Rays and two star shapes fill the background. The tattoo uses soft shading and fine detail in black and grey ink, with strong contrast between the dark rays and the lighter watch face.

Realism Upper arm Pocket watch Wing Clock Roman numeral Rose Star Ray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch had belonged to Prior Edmund for forty years, and when he died in the February frost nobody in the house wanted to be the one to wind it. Brother Thomas said it was bad luck to touch a dead man's time. I told him time had never once asked my permission, and I took the silver case from the drawer of the infirmary desk before he could argue.

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Inside the lid someone had scratched a name I did not know, and beneath it a date from the year the east range flooded. The mechanism was stiff. I worked oil into the escapement with a goose quill while the bell for Vigils rang over the water meadows, and the sound came through the cold air in the same tone it always had, which was the only comfort I could find that week.

On the third morning the light through the high window fell across the chapter house floor in bars so sharp they looked cut from slate. I carried the watch out to the rose bed where Edmund had kept his one vanity, a dark red bush gone leggy with the winter. I held the case up against the light and saw that the hands stood at a quarter past six, the hour they had carried him out.

I did not set it right. I wound it, let the hands run on from where they stood, and left it ticking on the wet stone among the roses, because a man's last hour is his own to keep, and the sun was already warm on the back of my neck.