Black and grey tattoo on an upper arm showing a winged emblem, a jackal-headed figure and other Egyptian-style figures with shaded clouds behind them.

Egyptian figures and winged emblem on an arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the upper arm and wraps over the elbow, showing a large winged emblem at the top, a small seated figure, and several Egyptian-style human and animal-headed figures in profile. The linework is clean and outlined, with soft grey shading that creates a cloud-like backdrop behind the figures. The image is in black and grey and is shot against a plain white wall with the arm bent at the elbow.

Upper arm Wing Cloud

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tracing paper tore again at the jackal's ear, and you swore under your breath, quietly, the way your mother swore in church. Forty sheets of the tomb wall lay pinned along the basement benches of the museum in Manchester, each a copy of the same stone, and each wanted to go wrong in the same place: the scales at the centre of the scene, which never sat level no matter how carefully you drew the pans. Mr Hollis had given you the wings to finish because your hand was steady, and so for three days you had lived inside the great winged emblem that spread across the top of the wall, feather by feather, the way a man might learn a language by copying its letters.

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Hollis came down on the Thursday with his spectacles pushed up into his hair and found the grey wash you had laid behind the figures. The stone itself was pale and smoke-stained, and the bearers in profile seemed to stand in nothing, so you had shaded clouds behind them in soft pencil, low and drifting, to give the procession some weather. He said the Trust wanted line and nothing else. You said the figures had never been carved on a blank wall, that someone must once have painted the sky around them, and that the sky had simply worn away before anyone thought to write it down.

He left the sheet on the bench that night and turned out the lamp. In the morning the wash had dried into something lighter than you remembered, and the jackal leaned over his scales with the pans finally level, as though the clouds had settled the matter while the building slept.