Black and grey realism tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder, with an hourglass, compass, anchor, palm tree and pink roses.

Hourglass, compass and anchor on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large arm piece centred on an hourglass with birds scattering from its top, beneath a shaded compass at the shoulder. An anchor, a palm tree and a small date sit at the lower left, and two pink roses run down the right side of the hourglass. Most of the design uses soft grey shading, with the roses adding the only colour.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Hourglass Compass Anchor Palm tree Rose Bird Cloud Date

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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

The tide had taken the lower stair of Carrick Keep again overnight, and Ivy Marr waded the flooded bailey with her boots in one hand and a torch in the other. Gulls had already claimed the broken chapel roof. She was looking for the sea's leavings, which were her living: brass fittings, green bottles, anything the winter storms pushed up through the drowned cellars.

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Behind the old chandlery wall she found a wooden case, swollen but sound, holding a ship's compass in a gimballed ring and an hourglass wrapped in sailcloth. The glass was cracked at one neck. Someone had scratched 1964 into the brass cap, and beneath it a small anchor. Her grandfather had kept a glass like this on the dresser of the Dunmore Maid, and he used to say a sailor's whole life ran through one only once, and the sand never came back up.

She sat on a fallen merlon and turned the glass. The sand fell in a thin pale thread, and where it gathered at the bottom a faint shape of towers showed through the grains, as if the castle had sunk into its own hourglass. Then the birds came, a flock of starlings lifting from nowhere and scattering through the empty bulb like thrown ash. She watched until the last grain dropped and the birds were gone into the grey sky.

She did not sell it. She wrapped the compass in her scarf, stood the glass upright on the case lid, and walked back through the shallows with the tide cold at her ankles. At the gate she turned it once more, and the sand began to climb, grain by grain, toward the top, which was how she knew she would have to come back and see the rest.