Realistic colour tattoo of an hourglass with a glowing amber top bulb and a bare tree in the lower bulb, shown on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic hourglass with bare tree on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large hourglass with a dark metal frame and ball finials fills the centre of the arm. The top bulb glows amber with a small dark shape in the sand, while the lower bulb shows a leafless tree on grey ground, with soft shading that gives the glass depth. The palette mixes warm golds and browns with greys and black, and the tattoo sits against a blurred dark background.

Realism Upper arm Hourglass Tree Sand Glass Frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come closer, the lot of you, and mind the fire, it spits when the wind comes round off the bog. My grandmother kept a glass in her parlour that a travelling clockmaker left in pawn for a bed and a bowl of broth. Two bulbs of thick glass, a frame of black iron with knobs on the top like a crown of little cannonballs. She told us the top bulb held the hours not yet spent, and the amber in it was the last of a harvest sun, poured through a crack in the sky.

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The sand in the top was dark as a rook's wing, and one winter she set the glass on the sill and turned it every morning, the way she turned the bread. The garden out back had been a good garden once. Apple trees, a cherry that fruited sour, and at the bottom a single ash that the frost had taken the summer before. Every day she watched the lower bulb fill with grey, and every day the little leafless tree inside it looked a bit more like the one outside the window.

In March the sand ran out before she did. We found the glass turned face down on the sill, the top bulb empty and the bottom one heaped with grey. Her boots were by the door, her pipe on the step. Under the tree, where the frost had been, a green shoot was pushing up through the dirt, no taller than a thumb. She said it would come, if you kept turning the glass.

So mind the fire, and mind the sand. Turn your glass when you go to bed.