Black linework drawing on paper of a tattoo design with a swallow, an hourglass, flower blooms, leaves and dotted beads, with no body part shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Swallow, hourglass and flowers design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink line drawing on cream paper shows a tattoo design built around a swallow in flight, an hourglass with a beaded rim, and two large open flowers. Leaves, small rose buds and strings of dots fill the gaps, and some areas are shaded with stippled dots. The composition is vertical and symmetrical, with the motifs arranged around a central hourglass.

Dotwork Botanical Swallow Hourglass Flower Rose Leaves Bead Dot

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

The swallows came back to Hollin Cross the same week the lamplighter's boy died, and Mother Agnes said it was no accident. She set her bread on the sill and told the children that a swallow carries the year's last hour in its throat and drops it wherever it is most needed. Nobody asked her how she knew which hour it was.

Keep reading

That summer the bell at the chapel stuck, and the sand in the village hourglass ran slow. Brannock the miller swore the glass was cheating him of his grinding time, so he took it down, turned it in his hands, and found a crack in the rim beaded with river mud. He scraped the mud away with his thumbnail and the sand poured out faster than before. Agnes said that was because he had been holding it too long.

They put the hourglass back on its nail above the door, and the flowers grew up round it of their own accord, two great blooms like the eyes of a sleeping cow, and roses no bigger than a thumbnail. Dots of rain came down the wall beneath them all autumn. When the swallows left again, they went without a word, and the glass ran true for the first time in living memory, and nobody in Hollin Cross ever again asked what hour it was.