Black and grey pen drawing of an hourglass inside an ornate oval frame, with roses and hatched leaves, shown as a tattoo design.

Hourglass in an ornate frame with roses

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn tattoo design of an hourglass set inside an ornate oval frame with scrolled edges and a jewelled top. Roses and hatched leaves sit around the base and the upper left, with a small sprig of foliage beside the lower rose. The bold outlines are filled with soft grey shading on a plain off-white background.

Botanical Hourglass Rose Leaves Frame Foliage Sand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last tent of Harrowby's Travelling Marvels had lost its striped roof to a February gale, so the company sold tickets from a card table by the caravans. Mrs Tully kept the books and said the takings would not buy diesel for the road to Carlisle. Her grandson Piers wound the old hourglass that stood beside the box office, the one in the oval brass frame with the jewel at its crown, because his grandfather had said a crowd will wait for a thing it can watch running out.

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A woman came up the lane at dusk with a pressed rose inside her coat and asked to buy the glass. Piers told her it was not for sale. She nodded as if she had expected that, laid the rose on the table and sat down on a crate to wait. When he asked what she was waiting for, she said only that she wished to see how much was left in it. Mrs Tully began to laugh, then stopped, because the woman's face was not unkind and the sand was very low.

So they watched it together. The strongman came out with his braces hanging. The tightrope walker's daughter came out in her socks. The clown who had not made a joke since Easter stood with his hands in his pockets and counted the grains as they fell in a thin gold line. When the last of the top bulb emptied, the woman stood, lifted the glass and turned it over. Now you start again, she said, and walked off down the lane. The sand ran through the neck in a fine bright thread, and the company, somehow, stayed to see it through.