Two pencil flash drawings on paper of an hourglass, roses, pearl chains and a compass, in a neo-traditional style, with one sheet partly tinted in pale blue.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hourglass, roses and compass flash sheets

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

Two sheets of paper show drawn tattoo designs featuring an hourglass wrapped in pearl chains, several roses with shaded petals and leaves, and a compass. The linework is dark and fine, with grey pencil shading on the roses and hourglass, and the right-hand design has pale blue on the compass face and hourglass top. The designs are arranged diagonally across a wooden surface, with the right-hand sheet placed over the left.

Neo-trad Hourglass Rose Compass Pearl Chain Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sand had run out twice before Ada thought to look at the compass. Saltcombe's chandlery smelt of tar and wet rope, and the hourglass on the counter had been her father's, the brass gone green at its collar, the glass cradled in a loop of his mother's pearls because he said the sea would take anything loose. Every night since the Mary Ellen missed her tide, she turned it when the lamps were lit and watched the sand fall into the lower bulb like coins into a till.

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The compass sat on the windowsill beside a jar of roses from Mrs Rowe's garden, their petals browning at the edges. Its needle had swung south-west for three days, which meant wind, and wind meant either a fair run home or a bad one. Ada had stopped trying to decide which. Her brother Sam had written in March that the Greenland run paid enough to clear the shop's debts, and she had believed him the way you believe a tide table.

On the fourth night a boy from the harbour office came up the steps without knocking, his cap in his hands. He did not say the word lost. He said the Mary Ellen had been seen off the Scar at dawn, under reduced sail, and that the tug was going out to her. Ada stood with the cloth still in her hand. She had the strange urge to turn the glass over, as if that would make the news run backwards.

She did not. She left it standing and took the compass down, opened the lid, and let the needle settle. Then she walked to the quay with it in her coat pocket, and when the tug's lantern came round the headland she read the bearing aloud to nobody, south-west, exactly where she had been told to look.