Black and grey line drawing of an hourglass wrapped in leafy vines, a botanical flash design with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hourglass entwined with vines

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of an hourglass standing on a round base, with sand partly settled in the lower bulb and a stippled trail falling through the narrow neck. Thin vines with curling tendrils and serrated leaves wind around the glass and spread outwards across the composition. The work uses fine ink linework and dot shading on a plain white background.

Botanical Fine line Hourglass Vine Leaves Sand Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had found its way under the awning by eleven, so I dragged the brass lamps off the trestle and set the hourglass on a folded tea towel where the drips couldn't reach it. Nobody had wanted it since Tuesday. It was the sort of thing a house clearance throws in a box of chipped saucers, a glass bulb pinched at the waist and held between two turned posts of pale wood, and I'd priced it at four pounds because I couldn't think what else to do with it.

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A man in a waxed jacket stopped at the stall just before the market shut, looked at it for a long time, and asked whether it still worked. I told him it had been running when I found it, which was true in a way I couldn't have explained. The sand had settled in the lower bulb, but a thin stippled line still hung from the neck as if it had been caught mid-fall. Green shoots had come up through the base where the wood met the flagstones, and their tendrils had wound up the posts and around the glass. The serrated leaves were still wet from the morning.

He paid the four pounds without haggling, which made me uneasy. The next Saturday he came back with rain running off his hood and said the vines had reached the top of the glass and started curling over the rim. He wanted to know how long it would take for the sand to run through again. I said I didn't know, and that I'd keep the stall open until he found out. He laughed, then stopped laughing, because he had already tipped the glass in his hands. Somewhere under the awning a leaf unfurled with a sound like paper.