Black and grey realism tattoo of a skull in an hourglass with a chain and lightning background, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull hourglass on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large hourglass fills the forearm, with a skull in the upper bulb and a second skull among the sand in the lower bulb, linked by a looped chain at the neck. Shading is smooth and tonal, with strong highlights on the glass and bone and dark, dramatic lightning and smoke behind the design. The tattoo is shown in black and grey ink, photographed upright against a tiled floor and a dark chair.

Realism Forearm Hourglass Skull Sand Chain Lightning Smoke

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you. This tent has more draughts than a Methodist chapel and I'm not paying for the canvas twice. No, leave the lamp where it is. The lightning is only the lamp, Mrs Tibbs, whatever the boy with the sparklers tells you.

Keep reading

Our last season, the Pellicano Brothers' Grand Travelling Marvels had three elephants left and one of them was mostly opinion. Ezra Vane kept the sand clock in the wagon behind the cookhouse. Glass as thick as a thumb, sand the colour of stewed tea, and two little brass chains that rattled whenever the wagon hit a rut. Every night he turned it over and every night he said the same thing: the top half is for the living and the bottom half is for what they've spent. Nobody asked him what he meant. You don't ask a man who sleeps beside a clock.

Then the bank in Ludlow wanted the wagon, the big top split in a gale, and the ringmaster drank the takings in a single evening. Ezra sat on the step of the empty wagon with the hourglass in his lap and watched the sand run down one last time. He told me later it sounded like a dog settling down to die.

On the final night there was no crowd, only a tramp, two farm lads and a girl selling toffee apples in the rain. Ezra walked into the ring and set the glass down on the sawdust. He did not perform. He waited until the last grain fell, then turned the glass over, and walked out into the dark. We never saw him again. But the sand in that lower bulb never quite settled, so they say, and if you hold it to the lamp you'll see two shapes in it that weren't there before.