Black and grey realism style tattoo on a man's upper back showing an hourglass, a pocket watch, a skull and two roses.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hourglass, skull and roses on a back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers much of the upper back and shows an hourglass centred above a skull on the left, with a pocket watch partly behind the hourglass on the right and two roses at the base. The linework is fine and detailed, with shading that gives the glass, watch face and skull a rounded, engraved look. The design is entirely black and grey against the pale skin and a plain blue-grey background.

Realism Back Hourglass Pocket watch Skull Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sand-keeper of Velmoor had tended the king's glass for thirty winters, and in all that time he had never turned it before the bell. So when the queen's third child came early and grey in the blanket, the king sent a page through the snow at midnight to fetch him, and the page ran the whole way with his cap in his fist.

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The king was waiting in the nursery with the child on his knee. "Turn it back," he said. "Only a little. Give her the hours she was owed."

"Time is not owed, Majesty. It is only spent, and each grain goes down once." The sand-keeper set his own pocket watch on the table beside the great hourglass, its brass lid scratched from forty years in his father's pocket and then his own. Above them on the shelf sat the old physician's skull, which the court had kept since the plague year so that no one would forget to count. The king looked at the skull and then at the watch, and his face changed.

"What would you have, then?"

"Half the years off your own reign, lent to her. You will be a poorer man at the end of it."

The king laughed the way a man laughs when he has already decided. He signed the paper with the queen's silver pen. In the morning the child was asleep and warm, and on the nursery sill lay two roses from the queen's garden, one white, one browning at the edges. The sand-keeper lifted the glass from its stand and found the top bulb fuller than it had been in thirty years, and the king, when he went to shave, found a single white hair above his left ear that had not been there the night before.