Small fine line tattoo of a bucket and an hourglass on the ankle and top of a foot, with grey shading on the bucket.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bucket and hourglass on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A small tattoo of a bucket and an hourglass sits on the side of a bare ankle and foot, with a green sleeve visible at the top of the frame. The bucket is shaded in grey with a reddish tint, while the hourglass is drawn in thin dark outline with little or no fill. The background is a dark seat, and the composition is a close, straight-on view of the foot.

Fine line Ankle Hourglass

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the bucket, my girl, it has more sense than the men who carry it. Nobody remembers who first set a bucket and a glass side by side on the quay at Skerrow, but the gulls have their opinions. Every morning the bucket went down to the harbour steps and came back heavy with grey water, and every afternoon the glass was turned by whoever had the patience to turn it, so that the sand ran down the middle like a thread someone was slowly pulling.

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One February a boy named Tam Orrin decided the bucket was lazy. He said a bucket only held what it was given, and a glass only counted what was already gone, so between the two of them nothing ever got done. He took the bucket to the top of the cliff and filled it with the sea's leftovers, the kelp and the crabs and a pair of boots, and he set the glass beside it so the sand could watch. The tide came up that night and found the bucket empty and the glass ruined.

That is why the fishermen of Skerrow still paint their buckets with a little rust at the rim and why none of them will let a child carry the glass across the wet stones. Tam went to sea that spring and came back a grown man with salt in his beard and a bucket of his own. He turned the glass over before he spoke a word, and I have never seen a man so careful with a thing that was only sand.