Hourglass tattoo on the forearm with an ornate grey frame and purple and blue galaxy sand dotted with white stars.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Galaxy hourglass on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

An hourglass sits upright on the inner forearm, with an ornate grey frame decorated with beads and scrollwork. The glass is filled with a purple and blue galaxy, with white star sparkles in the upper and lower bulbs and a thin falling stream between them. The frame is shaded in greys while the sand is rendered in smooth colour blends against a plain, pale skin backdrop.

Forearm Hourglass Galaxy Star Sand Frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hourglass in the hall at Gull Cottage had not been turned in living memory, and Mrs Pryce would not let anyone touch it. The frame was pewter gone grey at the knuckles, beaded all round like a bishop's cuffs, and the glass held sand that was not sand at all. Someone had poured a night sky into it, violet at the top and a deeper blue pooling below, with little white stars caught in the drift.

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Guests asked, and I told them what I had been told: that it came off a Brighton barrow with a crack in one bulb, and that Mrs Pryce had mended it with a bead of resin and a prayer. She said the stars were grains that had got past the neck long ago and never fallen. Every evening at six she stood beside it with her hands folded and watched the thin thread of sky between the bulbs, the one part that still moved, and I thought she was counting something.

The week the ferry stopped running, a girl from the room above the kitchen came down at dusk with a torch and her suitcase half packed. She asked whether the glass still ran. I said only if someone was brave enough to turn it. She laughed and said that was the trouble with everything in this house. Then she lifted it, very carefully, and the sky began again from the top.

Mrs Pryce found the glass standing the right way up on the hall table the next morning, the girl's bus long gone. She didn't scold me. She laid her palm flat against the frame, the way you would steady a horse, and said the sky was only ever lent to a house for as long as somebody kept turning it. I have been turning it since.