Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a golden hourglass with black wings, olive branches and skulls on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hourglass with wings and olive branches

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A golden hourglass with a small bird perched on top sits at the centre of the design, with black wings spreading behind it. Skulls rest on the base and olive branches with green leaves and fruit wrap around the piece. Bold black outlines frame the solid colour of the gold, green and red, with soft shading on the glass and wings.

Neo-trad Botanical Forearm Hourglass Skull Wing Bird Sand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hourglass lived on the wheelhouse shelf of the Mabel Ruth for thirty years, lashed down with a strip of blue tarpaulin, and nobody was allowed to turn it but my uncle Tobias, who said it was the only clock on the Trent that never lied. Its brass frame had gone the colour of old butter. One spring a small grey-gold dove nested on top of it and wouldn't shift for the engine or the horn, so Tobias decided the thing belonged to us now.

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That was the year we carried olive oil, five hundred litres in tin drums from a depot near Kalamata to a bottling works at Gainsborough. Tobias sat up nights with the sand running red through the glass, counting locks and muttering about the cost of diesel. He had a bad debt from the old days and a brother drowned at Keadby, and Mum said the hourglass was his way of keeping the two of them in order. When he dozed, I'd turn it over and let the sand fall again, just to hear him swear.

At Torksey the lock gates groaned shut and the water began its slow climb. I watched the last grains drop through the neck, one after another, and when the top bulb was empty Tobias didn't reach for it. He lifted his cap, grinned, and said the oil would be fine, but the time was ours to spend. I turned the glass over myself and watched the red sand start to run again.

I still keep a single olive stone in my coat pocket, worn smooth from years of rolling it between my fingers. When the wind comes off the water I take it out and listen for the dove.