Colour realism tattoo of a gold pharaoh mask with pyramids, Anubis, a scarab beetle and Egyptian figures across an upper arm.

Egyptian pharaoh and scarab on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo on an upper arm shows a gold pharaoh mask with a blue and gold striped headdress at the centre, flanked by an Anubis head on the left and a stylised Egyptian woman on the right. Pyramids sit behind the headdress, and a scarab beetle, ornate fan shapes and carved figures fill the lower half. The shading is smooth and detailed, with bright gold, blue and red ink on the mask and mostly grey shading on the surrounding elements.

Realism Upper arm Pyramid Egyptian Headdress Mask Figure Fan

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Khenut had beaten the gold to the thickness of a fingernail, and still the left eye sat wrong, a finger too high, staring at the rafters instead of at the dead. Her husband said it was fine. He said it in the tone men use when they want their supper. Outside the workshop the Nile was low and the pyramids stood pale on the western edge, and the boy who swept lapis chips from the floor kept glancing at the jackal-headed standard by the door as though it might lean down and take him.

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The priest came at dusk with two bearers and a scarab of green stone on a cord, which he set on the bench without looking at it. He wanted the beetle worked onto the breast of the mask, rolling its sun across the chest, and he wanted it by morning. Khenut told him a beetle is only a beetle until the lamp catches its wings. He laughed and said that was the whole trade in a sentence, and left the stone behind as a deposit.

She worked through the night with a bone burnisher and a lamp of rendered fat. Near the third hour she laid the eye over again, pressing the leaf down with a wet thumb, and when she lifted the cloth the face looked straight back at her, steady, as if it had only been waiting for her to stop arguing with it. Amenhotep came in with bread, saw it, and said nothing at all, which from him was praise.

At dawn the bearers carried the mask away wrapped in linen. The boy asked whether the dead man would know the difference. Khenut said the dead know nothing, which is why they need us. Then she swept up the offcut of gold from the floor, pressed it flat between two stones, and kept it for herself.