Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hourglass tattoo on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small hourglass with a simple outline and light shading sits on the inner wrist, with the sand shown as a dark shape in the lower chamber. The photograph is black and white and shows the hand raised with silver nail polish, set against a dark patterned fabric. The tattoo is the clear focal point, with its lines crisp and its placement near the wrist crease.

Fine line Forearm Hourglass

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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

Now you'll want to hear about the glassman's last commission, though he never got paid for it, so don't ask me to explain that part. Tobias Quayle had a workshop above the chandlers on Fore Street, and every hourglass in Polmear for forty years came off his pipe. The lifeboat crew had theirs. So did the schoolmaster, who turned his every Monday to keep the children honest about their sums.

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One wet March a woman came up the stairs with a canvas bag and set it on the bench. Mrs Hennessy from the end cottages, whose husband had gone out on the Gulls and not come back. She wanted a glass that would run the other way, so the sand would climb back up and he would come walking over the hill. Tobias told her plainly that sand had no such habit. She cried, then asked for a small one instead, something she could carry in her coat.

He made it that week, the narrowest bulb he had ever blown, and he took care with the neck so the grains would fall slow as breath. When she came to collect it he had already filled the lower chamber with the fine sand from Pentire, and he held it up to the window so she could watch it run. She turned it over once, then twice, and handed it back. 'It's only a thing that keeps the time,' she said. 'That's enough, Mr Quayle. Enough to be getting on with.'

She walked home along the harbour wall with the glass cupped in both hands, and the old men at the slipway said afterwards that she never once looked at the sea. Tobias kept the bench, the pipe and the stub of his blowing rod, and the next winter he started making them smaller.