Traditional style flash design of an hourglass with an eye at its centre, two red and orange roses, and banners reading Time is Slipping.

Hourglass, eye and roses flash design

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A traditional style flash design showing an hourglass framed by two red and orange roses, with a central eye and two white banners reading TIME IS SLIPPING. The bold black outlines are filled with fine stippled dotwork shading in grey on the glass and sand, and solid flat red, orange and yellow on the flowers and banner details. The design is centred on a plain white background with light speckled texture.

Traditional Dotwork Hourglass Eye Rose Banner Sand Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags Pritchard found the glass in the vestry on the morning of her son's wedding, wrapped in a tablecloth that smelled of candle wax. Its banners had faded to the colour of old teeth, but the roses at either end still burned red and orange where someone had painted them with more hope than skill. A slip of paper was tucked under the frame. It read: for whoever marries the Hale boy, do not let them waste the sand.

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Dan Hale had never been one for speeches, and the vicar, Mr Oakes, had a cough that rattled the pews. So Mags carried the glass to the front herself and set it on the altar rail. Dan's bride, Priya, laughed when she saw the painted eye in its centre, lid open and watching. "It's looking at me," she said. "It has looked at everybody," said Mags, "since 1931."

When the vows came, the sand ran through steady as breath. Dan stumbled over his second line and started again, and nobody hurried him. Priya's gloves were too big, and she kept pushing them back up her wrist. Halfway through the reading the last grains slid down and the glass sat empty. Mags saw then that someone had painted a second tiny rose on the base, underneath, in yellow.

Afterwards, at the tables, they turned the glass over and watched the sand fall again, and each guest took a turn holding it up to the window. Mags never learned who had painted the rose underneath. She kept the glass on her kitchen sill after that, and every morning she turned it, and every morning the sand ran out just as the kettle came to the boil.