Black linework tattoo flash design of an hourglass, two roses, a pocket watch and scrolling banners reading I wish time was on our side, in a traditional style.

Hourglass, roses and pocket watch flash

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A line drawing of a tattoo design centred on an hourglass with a heart at its top, framed by roses and a pocket watch on a beaded chain. Two scrolling banners carry the words I wish time was on our side, with the phrase split across them. The linework is clean and uniform with no shading or colour, and the elements are arranged to fill a portrait-shaped sheet.

Traditional Hourglass Rose Pocket watch Banner Script Heart Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the stove, and mind the kettle, it spits. My grandfather kept the light at Scarrow Head for thirty-one winters, and he never once trusted a clock that ran faster than the sea. He had a silver pocket watch his own father left him, and beside it on the sill sat an hourglass with a little brass heart fixed to the top, because my grandmother put it there the day he took the post.

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Every hour of the night he turned that glass, and every hour the lamp had to be seen to, the wick trimmed, the lenses wiped of salt. The trouble with a sand glass, he used to say, is that it counts only what it's given. A gale can stop the lamp dead while the sand runs on regardless. So when the fog came in thick off the Ness, he'd sit with the watch open on his knee and the glass at his elbow, and talk to them both like a man arguing with two bad lodgers.

The winter of the big wreck, the fog sat on the water three nights. On the third, a fishing smack lost her bearings, and he heard her bell, faint and off to the east. He turned the glass, looked at the watch, and understood the two of them disagreed by a quarter hour. He trusted the sand. He lit the lamp early and kept it burning until the sun came up, and every man aboard that smack came ashore alive.

Afterwards the watch went into the sea with him, and the glass stayed on the sill where it had always been. Nobody ever settled which of them was right, and my grandfather never said. He only told me this: wish for time on your side if you like, but keep your hands on the lamp.