Black and grey realism tattoo of an hourglass with a tree and roots on the upper arm of a person wearing a striped top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hourglass and tree on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large hourglass fills the upper arm, with a shaded tree growing from the upper bulb and a second tree with spreading roots in the lower section. Fine shading and cross-hatched bark give the piece a detailed, three-dimensional look, and the roots extend across the arm. The photograph is black and white and shows the tattoo from the side, with the person's torso and denim shorts visible but no face.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Hourglass Tree Root

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sand in the glass ran slower that winter, or so I told myself. I turned it each morning on the sill of the woodcutter's cottage at the top of Ashcombe lane, where the last hedge gives way to beech and the path forgets whether it wants to be a path. My father had carried the glass up from the market in Frome wrapped in wet straw, and he set it there the way a man sets down a tool he expects to need again.

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He never told me what the two trees were for. The upper one grew from the top bulb, a rowan with roots as fat as eels, and the lower one, an old oak, had its roots loosed and spreading out through the sand toward the door. When I asked him, he only said the wood keeps its own accounts, and a man who cuts from it owes the hour he takes. He took a great many hours. Every spring he went into the trees with his bow saw and came back with split logs and a cough, and every spring the rowan leaned a little further over the glass.

The last thing he did was walk me to the boundary stone and make me count the roots that crossed under the path. Eleven, he said. Count them every year and the wood will let you go on. I counted them the morning after the funeral, on my knees in the wet, and got twelve. A new one had come up in the night, pale as a peeled stick, thrust straight across the lane toward my boots.

I did not go in. I went back to the sill, lifted the glass and turned it over, so the oak roots ran down into the sand and the rowan hung upside down above the cottage. Then I sat with my hands in my lap and watched the grains fall, one hour and then the next, while the beeches creaked and the roots kept their slow arithmetic under my feet.