Black line drawing sheet of Egyptian symbols including the Eye of Ra, Eye of Horus, ankh, winged scarab beetle and several hieroglyphs, with German and English captions.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Egyptian hieroglyphs and symbols reference sheet

Black and grey · Flash

A reference sheet of black line-drawn Egyptian hieroglyphs and symbols arranged in a grid on a white background. It includes the Eye of Ra, the Eye of Horus, an ankh, and a winged scarab beetle at the bottom, each with English and German captions. The drawings are bold, simple and evenly weighted, with no shading.

Eye of horus Ankh Wing

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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 folder lies open on the counter between your stamp and your cold tea, and the man on the far side of the glass is waiting for you to finish reading it. Inside are copied drawings in black ink on white paper: birds with bent heads, a loop with a cross-bar, eyes that look sideways out of the page. Someone has written captions under each one in two languages, as if the drawings needed translating before anybody would trust them.

Keep reading

You read the captions slowly, the way your mother taught you to read the back of a tin. Good luck in the afterlife. Protection. Symbol of life. He tells you they are for his sister's wedding and that a tattooist in the city is waiting on the patterns before he can start. You ask him what a beetle with wings is doing on a wedding, and he shrugs and says a beetle that rolls the sun across the sky every morning has earned a pair.

You do not stamp anything yet. The rope ferry still runs across the river below the post, creaking on its cable, and nobody on either bank has ever asked the ferryman where he is going. You turn the last sheet over. The scarab there has its wings spread wide, like a bridge somebody forgot to finish.

When you hand the folder back, you ask him to draw the eye of Horus for you on the corner of your duty roster. He laughs, takes your pen, and makes a neat black eye with its lid half closed, as if it has decided to let you sleep. You stamp his form and wave him through, and the barrier rises slowly in the grey light.