Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hourglass design with dotwork shading

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Flash

A large black ink drawing of an hourglass with curled decorative edges sits on a white background, with its sand and base shaded in stippled dots. Two smaller photos show the same hourglass printed on temporary tattoo sheets lying on grass, and a small version applied to a finger. The linework is fine and the shading is entirely in black and grey.

Dotwork Hand Hourglass Sand Temporary tattoo Grass

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the rain is finding the gap in the awning again, and I'll not shout over it. Hold your cup in both hands. Good. Now, you think sand runs out. It doesn't. It only changes its address, grain by grain, from the top bulb down to the bottom one, and the glassmaker's daughter knew this better than any priest.

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Her name was Maud Pickering and she kept a stall on the corner of Butcher Row every Thursday, when the market sheds leaked and the stallholders swore at the sky. Her father blew the glass in a cold shed behind the Crown. He curled the brass rims himself, little scrolls like wet ribbon, so the whole thing looked as though it might unwind if you breathed on it. Maud did the dotwork. She pricked the grey stipple into the sand and the base with a needle she kept in her apron, one dot for every day she had been given, and she never once counted them out loud.

A lad came under the awning one wet afternoon with a tin of coppers and a face like a shut door. He wanted to buy back a week. Maud looked at his tin, then at the rain, and said she only sold the sand. She gave him the smallest glass on the table and told him to turn it whenever the fear came up the stairs. He turned it all that winter. The top bulb emptied, the bottom filled, and nothing was lost, only moved.

When he came back in spring to return it, Maud was gone, and the old man at the next stall took the glass from him and turned it over without a word. The first grain slid through the neck, slow as a drip from a gutter. "There," he said. "That's the bit nobody tells you."