Pencil sketch of an hourglass with bold black outlines and blue and purple watercolour-style splashes around it, drawn as a tattoo design.

Hourglass with blue and purple splashes

Fine line · Mixed · Flash

A hand-drawn pencil sketch of an hourglass shown in bold black outline with sketchy construction lines. Blue and purple coloured pencil washes and splatter-like strokes radiate from the sides, and the sand is shaded with the same blue tones. The sketch sits centred on a plain off-white sheet of paper.

Fine line Hourglass Sand Splash Sketch

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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

The snow had come sideways all afternoon, and by dusk the lane to Harrow Fell was gone entirely. Mrs Pennock set the hourglass on the bar beside the guest ledger, the one with the cracked brass cap, and told the two stranded drovers that it measured an hour exactly, though it had never once matched the church clock. Nobody asked her why she kept it. The fire popped. Somewhere above them a shutter knocked, patient as a knuckle.

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The younger drover, Tom Vesey, turned the glass over out of boredom. Blue light from the window caught the sand as it fell, and for a moment it looked less like sand than water pouring through a gap no wider than a thumbnail. He watched the top bulb empty into the bottom one and thought of his brother's boat going out on the Solway, the way the grey had swallowed it in a single breath.

When the last grain dropped, the knocking stopped. Mrs Pennock was already at the door with a lantern, her coat over her nightdress, calling a name that wasn't Tom's. Out in the white, a shape was walking towards the light, slow and certain, carrying something that sparkled like wet ice. Tom did not wait to see whether it was his brother. He turned the glass again, and the snow, obligingly, went back to falling upward.