Colour traditional tattoo of an hourglass with a skull, red roses, leaves and an eye with falling tears, on a lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional hourglass with skull and eye on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

An hourglass with a skull in its lower bulb sits at the centre, framed by red roses with orange centres and dark green leaves. An eye with an orange iris sits at the base with dripping tears below it. The bold black outlines, flat fills and shading on the glass and bands are typical of traditional work, and the tattoo is photographed against a white textured surface.

Traditional Calf Hourglass Skull Rose Flower Leaves Eye Tear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lorry drivers called it the graveyard shift, though nobody said that to my face. By four in the morning the lanes at Harwich were a row of blue lights and the coffee machine had given up. That was when Mr Okonedo, from a haulage firm in Antwerp, put a holdall on my counter and said he had nothing to declare except a clock.

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I unzipped it. Inside, wrapped in a grey wool sock, was an hourglass the size of my forearm, its brass cap worn pale at the edges. Red roses climbed its frame, and a painted skull sat in the lower bulb where the sand should have been. Someone had worked a tear-drop eye beneath the base, as if the thing had been crying for years. I asked him what it was for. He said his mother had kept it on the sill of a chandlery in Ostend, and it had run out the morning she died, and he had never once been able to turn it back.

Procedure says I log it as a curio and wave it through. I held it up to the strip light instead. The sand had settled into the lower bulb, grey as ash, packed round the skull's grinning jaw. I turned it over, just once, and watched a thin thread begin to fall.

Mr Okonedo watched my hands. 'Thirty years I've been carrying that,' he said. 'Go on, then, write it down.' So I wrote curio, one, and in the box for remarks I put: time resumes on the Dutch side. Then I zipped the holdall shut, handed it back, and stood at the window until his tail lights had gone under the barrier.