Small fine line and dotwork hourglass tattoo with swirls and dots on the inner wrist and forearm, in black ink.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small hourglass on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small hourglass outline sits on the inner wrist, with a narrow neck, flared top and base, and a dotted texture shading the sand in the lower bulb. Thin swirling curls and a pair of dots extend from either side of the hourglass at its midpoint. The tattoo is in black ink only, with clean, delicate linework and stippled shading against pale skin, and the plain grey brick wall and dark clothing sit in the background.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Hourglass Swirl Dot

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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

The glass is older than the barge, and you are the only one who turns it. Every morning on the Thorne Cut you set it on the lock beam beside the tea tin, and every morning Mrs Ilse Marrow from the Dunmore narrowboat asks why you bother when the lock gates already have a clock painted on them. You tell her the sand does not care what the paint says.

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Your father had the lock before you, and his father had it before him. The bulbs were blown in Birmingham by a man who wanted his name on the brass, and the neck is pinched so thin that the grains fall like a thread of sugar. Bargees measure a lock by it: four minutes to fill, six to empty. The iron ring bolts along the coping have swirls worn into their rust like the curls on a hand-lettered sign, and two dots mark the halfway point, where the water is level and nobody has to shout.

The autumn the flood came over the towpath, you kept turning it anyway. The water rose to the second rung of the ladder. The Marrow girl, Pell, stood on the roof of her father's cabin and counted aloud, and you counted with her, and when the lower bulb was empty you walked the gates open one breath before the glass said you should. Nobody drowned. The barge came up the cut at a stagger, all forty feet of it, and Pell waved the rope at you like a flag.

Now the glass sits on the sill of your little office, and Pell brings her own children down to watch it run. You let them turn it. You never tell them the sand is only sand.