Colour traditional tattoo of an hourglass framed by red roses and green leaves on a person's calf, with green canvas sneakers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hourglass and roses on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

An hourglass sits at the centre of the design, with what looks like a branching tree or plant inside its upper bulb and a few droplets or sand shapes below. Three red roses with green leaves frame the hourglass, with a purple and gold border and small beaded detail along the edge. Bold dark outlines and solid colour fills dominate, set against a warm, slightly soft indoor photograph of a leg resting above wooden flooring.

Traditional Calf Hourglass Rose Leaves Tree Droplet Bead

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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, and mind the stool, it has one leg shorter than the rest, like the Harcourt boy who went off to sea. You want the story of the reunion at Ashby Grammar, the year the hall was repainted green and nobody could agree on the colour. Forty of them came back that night, all grown, all pretending they had not spent their lives waiting for the bell.

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There was a woman called Marjorie Penhale who had kept the chemistry lab keys for thirty years, and she turned up with a sand-glass in her coat pocket, the kind the old games master used to set on the desk for timed tests. She said she had found it in the cupboard under the stairs when they knocked the cupboard out. Inside the top bulb, someone had grown a little sapling out of a scrap of soil, sealed in with a drop of wax, and the thing was still green. Nobody believed her until she tipped it, and the sand ran down past a tree that had no business surviving.

They argued about it until the caretaker shouted for lights. Two of them wanted to take it home. Marjorie would not let it leave her hand. She said a glass like that only runs true if someone turns it at the right moment, and she had never once been brave enough to turn it. So she handed it across the table to the youngest of them, a lad who had been sent off for smoking behind the bike sheds, and he turned it, and the roses on the lamp-stand shook and the tree in the glass leaned towards the door.