Black ink dotwork drawing of a jackal-headed Anubis figure with an ankh on a forearm-like shape, set among geometric lines and sun motifs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anubis head and ankh dotwork design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a jackal-headed figure resembling Anubis, with its head detailed in fine hatching and ornamental patterns. An ankh is drawn on the lower arm-like form, and the composition sits on a cream background with compass-style lines, circular sun motifs and a dark arc along the top edge. The work relies on stippled dotwork shading and linework with no colour.

Dotwork Geometric Ankh Sun Geometric pattern Hand Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night the salt lorries backed up at the Kessel gate, Dmitri Vale told me the jackal carved over the lintel had been set there to watch the dead cross, not the living. I didn't believe him. I was twenty-two and paid to check stamps, not omens.

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The traveller came on foot at two in the morning, a man in a grey coat with a rolled chart under one arm. His papers were in order except for his place of birth, which he had written as a village that appeared on no map I owned. Dmitri shrugged. "Then it's older than the map." I asked to see the chart. He unrolled it on the counter: circles, sun discs, lines fanning from a single point, all shaded in dots so fine they seemed to hum under the lamp. In one corner sat a small ankh, and beside it a hand gripping the cord of a scale.

I ran the measurements the way the manual said, and the scale in the margin matched our gate to the metre. Then the jackal on the lintel turned its head. I am surer of that now than I was then, and the wood had been repainted that spring, so perhaps the lamp did it. The man smiled, took back the chart, and said the weighing was only a formality when the feather was the right one. I stamped his paper. The ink came out dark, and the ankh I pressed beside the seal came out clean.

Dmitri says the man still comes through every spring with a new chart and the same dots. The lintel has gone bare and grey now, polished by hands. I stamp everyone who passes with the same small key, and I never ask where they were born.