Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Hourglass with skull and pine trees
Black and grey · Flash
The drawing shows an hourglass with the word TIME on the upper band and KILLS on the lower band. The upper bulb holds bare and pine trees, and the lower bulb holds a skull resting on a small mound of earth. The work is rendered in black ink linework and stippled shading on a white background.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Now sit down, the lot of you, and stop fiddling with those glasses. Dolly Marrin ran the Palais at Skelby for thirty-one years, and on the bandstand she kept an hourglass in a brass frame, the sort a ship's chandler sells to men who mean to be punctual. Every Saturday at eight she turned it over and said, there, that's your dancing. When the sand's gone, so's the waltz, and nobody gets a second go round.
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In the spring of 1962 a bandleader called Walter Tuck, with a cough like a dropped tin tray, asked her for the last waltz. She said the sand would not wait for him to finish his fags. He said then they'd best be quick. They danced past the glass twice, while the pines on the cliff above the hall went black against the sea and the whole room clapped along. Dolly kept her eyes on the top bulb the entire time, counting grains the way a miser counts coins.
The Palais shut in 1979 and the council carted off the chairs. Walter, who never once stopped coughing, came back on a wet Tuesday and found the glass lying on the boards, unbroken, with sand banked in the lower bowl like a small grave. He picked it up and turned it over, and the first grain began its slow walk down while the old band tuned up in his head, and for once in his life he did not count.
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