Red ink sketch of an hourglass, pocket watch and roses above a banner reading MAKE EVERY MOMENT COUNT, in a traditional tattoo flash style.

Hourglass and pocket watch flash design

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A red ink line drawing on cream paper shows an hourglass and a pocket watch with Roman numerals, set among roses and leaves. A ribbon banner across the bottom carries the words MAKE EVERY MOMENT COUNT. The linework is bold and sketched, with light hatching and shading in the hourglass sand and the watch face, and the elements are arranged symmetrically across two sketchbook pages.

Traditional Hourglass Pocket watch Clock Rose Leaves Banner Lettering

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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 down, sit down, the fire will hold for one more telling if you keep your boots out of the grate. You want the one about Orla Vennick and the red sketchbook? Everyone asks about the sand. Nobody asks about the roses, and the roses are where it started, so you will hear them first.

Keep reading

In the years after the long dark, the keepers of the Harrow Clock had one hourglass left that still ran true, tall as a doorway, and one pocket watch that had belonged to the last man who could read Roman numerals aloud. Orla drew the whole thing in red chalk on pages torn from a ledger, because pencil would not take in the cold. She drew leaves curling round the frame and roses pushing up through the base, because the glasshouse gardeners swore frost killed everything except what was tied to something older.

The council wanted the glass smashed so the city would stop counting down to the blackout. Orla argued they should count up instead. She turned the watch face to the sand and let each grain fall as a moment someone had chosen to keep, and she painted the words across the lintel of the square in letters a child could read. Within a season the lamps came back on in order, street by street, the way the numbers go round a face.

So when you hear sand running, don't count it, spend it. The watch is still in the bottom drawer of the old shop, and it still shows the hour it stopped, a Tuesday in late autumn, the afternoon she put down her chalk and went home for supper. Pass me the poker. The fire is listening too.