Black and grey fine line hourglass tattoo on the inner wrist of a raised hand, photographed against a dark patterned fabric.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small hourglass tattoo on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small outlined hourglass sits on the inner wrist of a hand held up against a dark, ornate patterned fabric. The frame is drawn with thin, even black linework and the sand in the lower chamber is lightly shaded in grey. The photograph is black and white, with the tattoo placed low in the frame and the fingers and nails visible above it.

Fine line Forearm Hourglass Sand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every winter at Harrow End the glass hung on a nail by the byre door, and every morning Mabel Rusk turned it before she went out to the ewes. The farm sat so high that the snow shut the lane from November to March, and the only thing that moved without anyone's leave was the sand. Her husband had bought the glass off a tinker for a sack of barley, and he used to say it measured the time between feeds and not the time between lives, which was a matter for the parson.

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The stranger came up the track one evening in February, when the light was going green over the tops. He was dry in spite of the rain, and he did not stamp the snow from his boots. He stood at the byre door looking at the glass as though he had been expecting it. "You could stop that," he said. "Hold it still and nothing would fall. Nobody would be older for it." Mabel said the lambs would still come in March whether she held the glass or not, and she asked him in to the fire, because that was what the lane required of a person.

He stayed for supper and talked of roads and of a town where all the clocks agreed. When he was asleep in the settle she took the glass down and turned it once, so the full chamber lay underneath. Then she stood it on the table and watched. By morning the sand had settled in the lower bulb as it always did, a grey mound no bigger than a thumb, and the stranger was gone with the snow on his track still undisturbed.

She rehung the glass by the door. In March the lambs came in the night, four of them, and she was out with a lantern until dawn. Every morning after that she turned the glass and watched it run, and she found she did not mind the sound it made, which was the sound of the whole farm breathing out.