Pencil sketch of an hourglass wrapped in leafy vines and two scroll banners with script, in a botanical tattoo design style.

Hourglass with vines and scroll banners

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of an hourglass with a sand-filled lower chamber, wrapped by thorny vines and leaves that climb and trail around its frame. Two scroll banners cross the glass and carry lines of cursive script, which are too small to read clearly. The linework is fine and shaded in soft greys, with the composition centred and the vines extending beyond the outline on all sides.

Botanical Hourglass Vine Leaves Banner Script Sand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sand in the lower bulb is grey-white and sifted twice, because Mastor Ilias will not let a grain of Nile silt into a measure he has sold to a magistrate. You carry the glass to the vineyard wall on a leather tray, one hand under the frame and the other pressing the stopper flat. Behind you the workshop smells of cooling lead and wet clay, and the vine that has grown through the roof since spring drops its tendrils on your neck like cold fingers.

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Ilias wants the glass set on the wall where the grapes will be picked. Each time the sand falls, the pickers take a basket. He tells you the old clocks were cut for the emperor's baths, but this one measures a day for the men who work the press, and every turn is a small bargain between the master and the sun. Along the frame the scribe has bound two strips of parchment, lettered so finely that when you hold them to the light the words slide off the page like water.

You do not read them. You only count. Seven turns before the first basket goes down the terraces, and you find the boy who has been stealing figs from the trellis and set him to watch the sand instead. He does it with his tongue between his teeth, the way you once did, and when the last grain drops through the neck he shouts so loudly that a flock of starlings lifts out of the press house.

Ilias comes out wiping his hands on his apron. He looks at the empty bulb, then at the boy, then at you. Turn it, he says, and walks back inside without waiting to see whether you do. You lift the glass by its cracked frame and feel the sand gather itself at the neck, but you do not turn it. You lay it on its side in the dust, where it runs slowly out among the roots, and go to find the next basket.