Photograph of a watercolour-style hourglass tattoo with blue, orange and red splashes on a woman's upper back, placed between the shoulder blades.

Watercolour hourglass on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

An hourglass outline is drawn in black linework, with loose sketchy strokes and small sparkle marks on the glass. Blue, orange, red and purple watercolour washes bleed around and below the shape, with splatter drips extending outward. The tattoo is centred on the upper back, photographed from behind with the subject's hair in a ponytail.

Back Hourglass Watercolour Splash Sand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Greaves kept the hourglass on the piano lid at the Pavilion, and nobody was allowed to touch it but him. It was a squat brass thing in a wooden cradle, and it gave every dance exactly ten minutes before the bandleader had to call the change. When I took over the Saturday nights in the summer of fifty-six, he handed me the key to the cupboard and the glass and said the sand was older than the hall.

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The trouble was the sand itself. It came out of a cove up the coast, pale grey and fine as flour, and in damp weather it clung to the glass so the top would stall halfway through a foxtrot. I learned to tap the frame with two fingers, the way you'd wake a sleeping dog, and to watch for the blue light from the mirror ball catching the falling grains. Orange came in off the sea windows at dusk, red from the exit sign over the fire door, and between them the whole room looked like it was being poured out.

On the last Saturday of August a sailor asked me to turn it early. He had a partner who kept checking a wristwatch, and he wanted the ten minutes gone before the ferry horn sounded at eleven. I said no. Ten minutes is ten minutes, Mr Greaves would have said. But I looked at the sand, and then at the sailor's face, and I turned the glass myself, quick and clumsy, so the dust ran the wrong way for a moment and the dancers laughed.

Nobody noticed the lie but me. The band struck up again, the mirror ball spun its blue spill across the floor, and the sailor led his partner out past the potted palms without a word to me. I stood by the piano until the sand settled, grain by grain, into the bottom half where it belonged.