Line drawing flash of a winged pocket watch with a rose cluster beneath it, in a neo-traditional style, drawn on tracing paper with red pencil guidelines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged pocket watch with roses flash

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

The drawing shows a pocket watch with a ring at the top and Roman numerals, flanked by two large feathered wings. A cluster of roses sits below the watch face, with leaves filling the lower edges. The design is drawn in black outline with red pencil construction lines and light shading on the petals, on translucent paper.

Neo-trad Pocket watch Clock Wing Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The watch came in on a Tuesday wrapped in a sock, which Dilys decided was the most honest thing anyone had handed her across the counter all week. Its case was dented on one side, the wings engraved so finely that she had to angle the lamp low to see the feathers. The hands had stopped at ten to twelve, and someone had scratched a tiny rose beneath the winding crown, as if to mark the place where it had given up.

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She knew the trade well enough to know the movement was sound. What was broken was the story someone had told themselves about it. Her father had taught her that a watch only stops when it is no longer wanted, and she had never been sure whether that was a kindness or a warning. She opened the back with a jeweller's screwdriver, cleaned the balance wheel with oil no thicker than a hair, and set the hands to the date engraved inside the lid, which read 3 June 1968.

By four o'clock the second hand was sweeping again. Dilys sat with it ticking against her ear like a moth against a window, thinking about the ticket on the hook, the name written in biro and the words 'collect by Friday' underlined twice. Nobody had written anything about the roses.

She wrapped the watch back in the sock, wrote 'Ready' on the ticket, and then, after a moment, drew a small pencilled rose beside the word.