Shaded flash drawing of a winged pocket watch with Roman numerals, surrounded by three roses, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged pocket watch with roses design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a pocket watch with a ring at the top and Roman numerals on its face, with feathered wings spreading from either side. Three shaded roses with curled petals sit at the base of the watch. The linework is dark and clean, with soft grey shading that gives the wings and petals volume against a plain pale background.

Neo-trad Pocket watch Clock Wing Rose Roman numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hand me the ladle and stop picking at the biscuit, because I'm only going to tell this once and the stew won't wait for the bit that matters. You see that watch hanging over the range? Brass, dented at the lid, with the glass cracked across the Roman numerals like frost on a window. Old Tobias Quill carried it aboard the Marguerite in the spring of forty-one, and he wound it every morning at four bells before he so much as touched the kettle.

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He had a rule, Tobias did. Never let a watch run down on a passage. He said a ship without a true clock is just a wet box of timber going nowhere. So when we lay becalmed off the Azores for nine days, with the rash spreading through the forecastle that the lads called roses, because the blotches curled pink on their necks like petals, he kept winding it, though the hands had long since stopped agreeing with the sun. The surgeon swore by vinegar and prayer in equal measure, and neither of them worked.

On the tenth morning a breeze came up out of nowhere, and Tobias went to wind the watch and found it had stopped at a quarter past six. He stood there with the key in his fist, and do you know what he said? He said, "Well then, we'll have to make our own time." So he took the men off the pumps, set them singing shanties, and by evening the Marguerite was limping into Ponta Delgada under every sail we owned.

The watch never ran again, not once in forty years. He kept it anyway and hung it over the galley stove so the men would see it and remember. Every morning I wipe the glass and I don't wind it, and every morning I still wake at the hour he did.