Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hourglass inside gold armillary rings

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

A gold armillary sphere of three overlapping rings encircles an hourglass with blue glass tops and sand in the bowls. Small outlined stars sit on a yellow-gold disc behind the hourglass. Bold black outlines and flat gold, yellow and blue fills give a clean, illustrative look, set against a faint scatter of pastel sparkle dots.

Neo-trad Other Hourglass Star Ring Sand Sphere

Find an artist for this

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

Sit down by the stove, the lot of you, and mind the kettle, because this is the one about Harold Quill and the sphere that wouldn't keep time.

Keep reading

Harold kept the clock in St Aldwyn's tower in Market Stoke, the year the Coronation mugs were still sitting in every shop window. The vicar had handed him a gold armillary sphere to mend, three rings of old brass that swung round a little world, and in its middle a pair of glass hourglasses the sexton had fitted for reasons nobody could recall. Harold took it apart on the vestry table, laid the rings out like cutlery, and found the trouble was not in the brass at all. Someone had filled the bowls with sand from the wrong beach. It ran slow in one glass and fast in the other, and the whole sphere had been turning to suit it for forty years.

He sat with it three nights. On the third, Mrs Dorrit from the post office came up the tower steps with a flask of cocoa and asked what he meant to do. Harold said he would not tell the sand how to behave. He would set the sphere true to the north star and let the hours find their own level.

So he cleaned the little stars on the disc with a rag and a drop of paraffin, and he squared the rings against the church's tall window, and when he was done the thing turned in his palm like a bird let off a string. Nobody in Market Stoke has ever agreed whether the church clock lost a minute that week or gained one. But Mrs Dorrit swears she saw the vicar's cat walk the length of the churchyard wall at exactly noon, and for Market Stoke that has always been proof enough.