Black line drawing flash of an hourglass, three roses, a pocket watch and banners reading I wish time was on our side, in a traditional style.

Hourglass, roses and pocket watch flash design

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows an hourglass at centre with a heart on its top cap, surrounded by three roses, a pocket watch with an open lid, and two scrolling banners with script lettering. Beaded chains, leaves and small feathers fill the gaps between elements. It is rendered in clean black outline with light dot shading on the sand, and no colour, on a plain white background.

Traditional Hourglass Rose Pocket watch Banner Script Bead Leaves Heart Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall smelled of floor polish and the same orange squash it always had, and Pauline Ashby was still holding the sign-in clipboard as if someone might take it off her. I found her by the raffle table, where Mr Tully's old hourglass sat with its sand gone soft and grey. She turned it over when she saw me, the way she used to in Year Ten when we were supposed to be revising.

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'Twenty-six years,' she said. 'Somebody's been keeping a tally.' She nodded at the wall, where the PTA had pinned a banner from our leavers' dance, blue paint on white card, the corners curling. Someone had drawn roses round the edges in felt tip. We had written those words in the back of her exercise book the summer we were fifteen, a line from a song neither of us could name now, and we swore the clock would never beat us.

She opened her handbag and took out a pocket watch on a broken chain. Its lid was open and the hands stood at twenty to four, the time the bell went on the last day. 'I found it in the lost property box when they cleared the old block,' she said. 'I kept meaning to give it back.' I told her Mr Tully had been dead nine years and nobody was going to come looking for it.

We could have stayed for the buffet and the speeches. Instead I took the watch from her palm, wound it until the crown turned stiff, and we walked out together into the car park. Behind us the sand kept falling in the hourglass on the raffle table, and nobody thought to stop it.