Black and white book illustration of a drawn face with geometric facial tattoo motifs, beside a printed table of Berber symbols including ram, bull, lizard and scorpion.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Berber facial motifs and symbol table

Other · Black and grey · Flash

A drawn face is marked with rows of geometric facial tattoo motifs, and a grid of small symbols sits beneath it. The facing page is a printed French table pairing Berber symbols such as the ram, bull, lizard, scorpion, fly, beetle and spider with short explanatory text. The drawings use bold black linework on white paper with no colour.

Other Face Geometric motif Ram Bull Lizard Scorpion Beetle Spider

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hadda had carried the bag of kohl and the copper needle across three dunes before she admitted to her aunt that the marks were no longer keeping the goats safe. Each night the lizard above the door grew fainter, and each morning the spiders had spun new webs over the water jars.

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Her aunt, Zohra, was a stubborn woman who kept the well at the edge of the salt road. She told Hadda that the ram carried the seed of the world, the bull held the strength to plough, and the scorpion sat on the threshold to turn away the evil eye. "Each one has its work," she said, "and each one grows tired if you ask it for two things at once."

So they sat in the courtyard with the old wall between them and the sun going down, and they drew the marks again, one by one, in soot mixed with water. Hadda gave the fly its restless lines and the beetle its turning wheel, and she made the spider's legs long so it could reach into the corners. When the last one was finished the wind dropped and a single cricket started up somewhere near the well.

Zohra looked at the wall for a long time. "You drew them rested," she said. "Now they will keep going." Hadda did not ask what she meant. In the morning the goats were all there, every one of them, standing in the shade of the lizard as if it had always been theirs.