Black and grey realism tattoo of an hourglass with a skull in its lower bulb and two roses, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hourglass with skull and roses on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

An hourglass sits diagonally across the thigh, with a skull shaded inside the lower bulb and sand drawn in the upper section. Two shaded roses frame the top left and bottom right of the hourglass, and the glass frame and chain-like detailing are rendered with soft grey tones. The image is a close crop of the leg, with a pink garment at the top edge and a tiled floor in the background.

Realism Thigh Hourglass Skull Rose Sand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mairi turned the hourglass before the kettle had boiled, as her mother had taught her, and watched the sand slide past the small skull Tam had set inside the lower bulb. The island folk said he had found it on the tideline below Gorse Point, bleached pale as a shell, and that he had blown the glass around it so the dead would keep time with the living. Nobody asked him if that was true. He was not a man for answering questions, only for making things that caught the light.

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The roses were the other part of his work. Each summer he dug the wild briar out of the cliff path and grafted it to the yard wall, and it bloomed heavy and grey-pink in the wind off the sound. He drew the frame himself, the chain-links on the brass and the little curls at the corners, and he always said the sand ran slow when the boats were out and fast when they came home.

The autumn the Morag Ann went down off Skerrow with six men aboard, Tam walked the cliff path every evening with his lamp. He did not come back from the seventh. Mairi kept the glass on the sill regardless, turning it each morning and counting the grains, because someone had to keep the time and the island had never managed it without a woman at the window.

By midsummer she could no longer tell whether she was keeping time for him or for herself. One morning she left the glass lying on its side, the sand settled at last in the lower bulb beside the skull, and she walked down to the shore with the kettle still cold. The tide came in over the rocks, the roses dropped their petals on the wall, and for the first time in a year the kitchen clock ran at the same speed as the sea.