Neo-trad tattoo on a thigh showing a shaded grey hourglass with pink roses, green leaves and dangling bead chains.

Hourglass and roses on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a grey hourglass with ornate scrolled borders and bead chains hanging from its base, with three pink roses and green leaves arranged around it. The hourglass is shaded in greys with smooth swirls in the sand, while the roses use pink and red tones with darker outlines. The design fills most of the frame on a thigh, with the roses placed at the top, left and bottom corners.

Neo-trad Thigh Hourglass Rose Leaves Bead Chain Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm kept the great glass in the cloister passage, where the damp came up off the flags and the roses on the trellis outside were always going over. Turn it at Lauds, he told the boys, and turn it again at Vespers, and never let the sand run out while you are looking at it. Lads looked anyway. I did, my first week, and I watched a whole hour trickle through the narrow neck like grey silk and thought nothing of it at all.

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The beads hung from the frame on a cord that had belonged to old Prior Tobias, who had counted his Aves on them until his thumbs wore thin. Anselm said a bead for every hour the glass held, so a man could feel his way through the day without looking up. When the sand ran dry he would lift the glass with both hands, slow as a man lifting a sleeping child, and set it back on its brass cradle the right way up.

The winter the roof leaked into the scriptorium, a frightened novice called Edwin came running to say the glass had stopped. Anselm walked the length of the passage, took it down, and found only a single grain caught in the neck, pale as a moth. He breathed on it, tapped it once with his knuckle, and let it go. Then he laughed, a short rusty sound, and said the hours had never been the sand's business at all.

Edwin turned the glass himself the next morning and counted the beads through the hour, one for each breath, while the last roses let go of the trellis and fell silent onto the wet flags. When the sand was gone he did not lift the glass at once. He sat with his thumbs on the cord, as Tobias must have done, and let the quiet be the hour.