Black and grey realism tattoo of a compass rose and an hourglass on the outer upper thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Compass rose and hourglass on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded compass rose with an eight-point star and fleur-de-lis top sits beside an hourglass with a dark ornate frame and turned wooden-style supports. The work uses smooth greyscale shading, with highlights on the glass and sand and dark outlines on the frame. The design fills the frame diagonally across the outer upper thigh against a plain skin background.

Realism Thigh Compass Compass rose Hourglass Fleur-de-lis Sand Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Owen Pascoe came up the Lanyon shaft on a Tuesday with a brass compass in one fist and an hourglass wrapped in his neckerchief, and he set both on our kitchen table as if they were the rent. My mother put the kettle on. My father, who had lost two fingers to the winding gear and believed in nothing he couldn't hold, said the man was a fool to bring a sand clock underground where the water already kept its own time.

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Owen didn't argue. He turned the glass so the sand ran from the bulb into the neck, and he showed me how the grains stacked into a little dune, then slumped and levelled, always the same amount in the same breath. 'Every shift you've ever worked,' he said, 'is one of these. The rock tells you how much you've got left before it tells you nothing at all.' He tapped the compass. 'This finds the way back to the light when the lamps fail.'

Three weeks later the roof came down in the east drift, and the rescue party had only Owen's charts and a candle. I went down with them because I was the only one small enough for the crawl. We counted the minutes by the glass he'd left on our table, which I had borrowed without asking, and I turned it each time it emptied. Eleven turns. Then the tapping came back through the stone, faint and steady, from the north bearing he had marked in chalk.

They brought out nine men that night. My father kept his fingers and my mother kept her kettle, and Owen kept the hourglass, though he never came back for it. I still turn it when the rota runs long, and watch the sand fall the way he taught me, one grain at a time, and trust the needle to find north.