Black and grey skull hourglass tattoo with stippled shading and hatched linework on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skull hourglass on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A skull sits within an hourglass, with its eye sockets and jaw drawn in heavy outlines and hatching. The frame and top of the hourglass are shaded with bold black lines, while the sand and parts of the glass use fine dotwork stippling. The design is shown in black and grey ink, centred on the forearm against a plain white background.

Dotwork Blackwork Forearm Skull Hourglass Sand Glass

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

Mrs Pell brought the skull to the workshop wrapped in a flour sack and set it on the bench beside the furnace without unwrapping it. "My husband's," she said. "He wants his days counted in sand, not candles, because candles gutter and sand only runs one way." Tobiah Crane turned the bone in his gloves. The jaw had been hinged with copper wire, and someone had packed the eye sockets with black wax so they looked like wells.

Keep reading

He worked three nights. He blew the bulbs thin as a held breath and ground the neck to a pinch so the sand would keep true time. The frame he cut from walnut, and the cap he shaped like a bishop's mitre. The sand was crushed oyster shell from the Harrow flats, bleached white. When he first tipped the glass, the grains hissed onto the bone and drifted into the skull's cavity like snow.

On the fourth morning Mrs Pell came back with her purse. She didn't look at the glass. She looked at the window, where the tide was creeping over the flats. "Turn it," she said. He reversed the frame and the sand began to fall, and he noticed, with the cold feeling of a man who has made a small mistake, that the grains ran through the open jaw as though the bone were a funnel, and the lower bulb was filling faster than it should.

He had weighed every grain himself. He stood and counted under his breath until the top chamber was empty, then looked up. The widow had gone. Only the sound of water on the flats came through the open door, and the lower bulb sat full and still, the way a thing sits once it has been finished for someone else.