Black and grey realistic black widow spider with a red hourglass on a web across a person's upper back, with script lettering reading for time and all eternity and a small rose on the shoulder.

Black widow spider and web across the back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A black widow spider with a red hourglass marking sits at the centre of a shaded spider web spanning the upper back. The spider and web are rendered in black and grey shading with soft highlights, while the hourglass is the only saturated red area. Script lettering reading for time and all eternity runs diagonally across the lower right, with a small rose and a short script word placed near the shoulder blade.

Realism Lettering Back Spider Web Hourglass Script Lettering Rose Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the pass for nine days when Marta Wenn came down the stairs of the Thistle Inn with a pail of ash and found the widow's web strung across the coat hooks. It was grey with frost and strung from the hooks to the lintel to the lamp, every thread bright. In the centre of it sat a black spider the size of a walnut, and on its belly was a red mark shaped like a sand glass.

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Her father, who had kept the inn before her, had called that spider the house keeper. He said you never swept a web from a room where the snow had caught travellers, because the spider would only spin another, and it was better to let it count the guests. So Marta left it. She fed the stove, she hung the wet boots by the fire, and each morning the web had caught one more thread of cold light from the window.

On the tenth day the stranger from the high road came in with frost in his beard and asked for a bed that would not be cold. Marta gave him the room under the eaves and watched him sleep. In the dark the spider walked the length of its web and set one line of silk along the doorframe, and when the stranger woke he found the thread had been tied to his wrist in the night, loose and bright as a promise.

He stayed the winter. In spring, when the road opened, he asked Marta what the spider had been counting. She turned the sand glass on the shelf and said that the house keeper only ever counted the ones who meant to stay.