Black and grey tattoo of a winged hourglass beneath an eye in a triangle, surrounded by numbers, on an upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged hourglass and eye in triangle on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a winged hourglass with a scythe-like blade below it, with an eye inside a triangle above and several numbers scattered around the design. The linework is fine and the shading is soft and detailed, with stippled grey tones on the hourglass and the wings. The design is entirely black and grey and fills most of the upper arm, with a second partial tattoo visible at the top edge near the shoulder.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Hourglass Wing Eye Triangle Scythe Number

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lorry came up to the barrier at ten to midnight, and Ruth Ackland had already turned the brass hourglass on the booth sill so the sand could start its fall. Nobody on the night shift at Carrick Bridge trusted the clock above the door, which ran four minutes fast and had done since the flood year. We trusted the glass instead. It had come off a dealer's stall in Lisbon, a winged thing with its handle worn bright by other hands, and Ruth's rule was simple: when the sand ran out, the paperwork was either finished or it was not.

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The driver, a broad man with a sunburned neck, handed over a manifest with 08 and 46 pencilled in the margin, as if someone had been doing sums in a hurry. Eight crates of antique clocks, bound for a shop in Carlisle. Ruth prised open the first with a bar and found faces packed in straw, each one stopped at a different hour. She counted them out loud and twice, the way her father had taught her to count fish. Twenty-two faces in that crate. Nineteen with cracked glass. Not one of them ticked.

In the last crate, under a curved blade wrapped in oilcloth, lay a small hourglass with its glass cracked across the middle. The sand had already slid into the lower bulb. Above us the camera on its pole turned slowly towards the lorry, and I thought of the eye in the old church triangle my grandmother kept on a tea tin, always watching, never blinking.

Ruth stamped the manifest and wrote the time beside it: 00:08. Then she turned the broken glass the right way up, though it could no longer measure anything, and set it on the sill beside the other. The barrier lifted. The lorry pulled away towards the Solway, and I watched its tail lamps until the road bent and took them.