Traditional flash design of a winged woman's face above an hourglass, framed by red roses and gold wings, on an aged parchment background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged woman with hourglass and roses

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A central female face with heavy eyeliner, red lips and rosy cheeks sits above an hourglass and is flanked by two red roses at the base. Bold black outlines, solid fills and stippled shading define the gold feathered wings and the hourglass, with dark brown hair framing the face. The design is centred on a warm, aged parchment background with a symmetrical composition.

Traditional Woman Face Wing Hourglass Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody aboard the Constance Vane trusted the glass after Madeira, so Mr Ketch hung it on a nail by the companionway and had me turn it by hand every half hour. I was twelve and proud of the job. I counted the bells in my head while the sand ran, and I learned that a crew will sleep through a gale but not through a gap in the watch.

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Off the Horn the sea came green over the rail for three days. The carved woman at our bow, all wings and painted eyes, held her own small glass up toward the weather as if checking it against heaven's. The carpenter said she was meant to be Fortune. Mr Ketch said she was Saint Barbara and had no business with sand at all. I thought she looked worried, which seemed fair enough.

On the fourth night the lamp went out in the galley and I was alone at the glass when the mate came below soaked to the skin, demanding the hour. I could not make out the numerals. I turned the glass anyway, and when he struck the bell I told him the time was right, because the sand had told me so and I had kept faith with it. He looked at me a long while, then laughed and said the sea would take our reckoning or it would not, and the glass was the only honest thing on the ship.

We raised Valparaiso in April with the roses in the captain's cabin pot half dead from salt. I turned the glass one last time before we tied up. The sand ran out clean and quiet, and I stood there watching it fall, sure of nothing except that I had not missed a single turn.