Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an hourglass with a diamond inside, two peonies and an everlasting banner on the side of the ribs.

Hourglass and peonies on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

An hourglass with a diamond set in its upper bulb sits at the centre, flanked by two full peony blooms and a few leaves. The design uses fine linework for the outlines and stippled dotwork for the shading on the glass, petals and banner. A curved ribbon at the bottom carries the word everlasting in script, and the tattoo is shown in black and grey on the side of the ribcage.

Dotwork Botanical Ribs Hourglass Diamond Peony Flower Leaf Banner Script

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on that creel and shut the door properly, the wind's been at it all night. You want the story of the Maud's sand-glass? My father told it to me the same way, with his boots steaming by the stove, so you'll forgive me if I'm slow.

Keep reading

Every boat out of Newlyn carried a glass by the wheel in those days, a brass-capped hourglass for timing the hauls, because the wheelhouse clocks ran fast and the skippers didn't trust anything that couldn't be turned over. Tom Penhale had one that came off a wreck at Mousehole. The upper bulb had a flaw in the glass that caught the lamplight like a diamond, and his wife Ada used to say it was the only diamond the Penhales would ever own, so they'd better keep it turning.

Tom went out in the February gale of '31 and the Maud came back without him. Ada didn't cry in the chapel. She cried in the scullery where nobody could see, then walked up the cliff path the next morning with a spade and dug in two peony roots from her mother's garden in Paul, pink ones that had no business surviving salt air. Folk said she'd gone soft in the head. She said a glass only ran out if nobody turned it.

So every dawn for forty years she carried that old glass down to the quay and turned it on the bollard, watching the sand slide through the flaw. Her grandson asked her once what she was waiting for. She pointed up at the cliff, where the peonies came up red as oilskins every June, and said, 'Everlasting, my love. Not the sand. The turning.'