Black and grey traditional flash design of an hourglass reading TEMPUS FUGIT, with a sailing ship in the top bulb and a skull in the bottom bulb.

Hourglass with skull and ship

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical hourglass sits between two stone-style caps, with TEMPUS FUGIT lettered on the top and bottom bands. The upper bulb shows a sailing ship on rolling waves, and the lower bulb holds a skull with a single falling drop above it. Bold black outlines are paired with grey shading and stippled texture on a plain white background.

Traditional Hourglass Skull Ship Wave Sea Lettering Drop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Tennant kept the cellar key on a loop of tarred string and never let it out of her apron, not even at the Michaelmas rent. Each autumn the sea came up the lane as far as the chapel wall, and each autumn she counted her lodgers twice, once for the living and once for the ones who had not gone home.

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That year there were six. A clerk from Hull who whistled hymns under his breath. Two sisters who played patience in the front room and never won. A widower with a brass telescope under his bed. And Abel Crane, who had come ashore off a coaster with a sea chest, a cough, and a padlock he would not open. He paid in silver for a month, then in promises, and on the last night of that month the tide came up the lane without any wind to push it.

The hourglass on the kitchen dresser began to run by itself. Mrs Tennant turned it once and it turned back. The sand hissed through the neck. In the top bulb a little ship rode painted waves, and in the bottom a skull waited with one bright drop falling towards it. Abel stood in the doorway and told her the chest held his father's last ship, carved from a single piece of driftwood, and that his father had sailed it out into the bay on a bet and never come back.

She took the padlock from his hand without asking. Inside the chest lay the ship, its sails no bigger than a thumbnail, and beside it a second glass with all its sand gathered in the lower bulb. She set it on the dresser beside the ticking one and turned it over. The sand in the top began to fall. "There," she said. "Now you have a reason to stay until it empties, and then you may go down to the water as you please." He stayed until the sand ran out. In the morning the tide had gone back down the lane, the chest was empty, and the sea was quiet.