Black and grey realism tattoo sleeve on a forearm showing Anubis, an Egyptian pharaoh portrait and an Eye of Horus with an ankh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Egyptian sleeve with Anubis and Eye of Horus

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two photographs of the same forearm sleeve: one shows a jackal-headed Anubis figure with an armour-like metallic shading and an Eye of Horus with an ankh below it, and the other shows a profile portrait of a woman in a striped Egyptian headdress. The linework is largely replaced by smooth, detailed grey shading with strong contrast and highlights. The figures are stacked along the arm from elbow towards wrist, with the portrait wrapping around the forearm in the second photo.

Realism Forearm Eye of horus Ankh Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crates had been sitting in the lee of Deptford Creek since the spring, and by October the straw inside had gone soft as wet bread. Dad wanted them off the barge before the tide turned, so I was up on the gunwale with a crowbar when the lid of the third one split and a jackal's head looked up at me out of the dark.

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It was plaster, painted once and then left to grey, its ears still sharp and the collar of beaten metal leaf flaking at the edges. Someone had cast it for a lecture hall in the twenties, a copy of something behind glass in a museum that had long since sold its collection. The cast had come through a cellar in Lambeth in one piece, which Dad said was more than most of us could claim. He stood on the towpath with his hands in his coat and told me to leave the little ones, they would only weigh us down.

Under the jackal, packed in the bottom of the crate, was a woman's face the size of a dinner plate. Her eyes were half closed and a striped headdress fell either side of her jaw. I wiped the dust off her cheek with my sleeve and the grey came away in a film like smoke. Dad saw it from the bank and went quiet, which he almost never does.

He told me later his mother had kept a face like that on the mantelpiece in Limehouse, and that she sold it the week before the big flood because the rent was due. We carried the crates up the planks one by one until the light went. I left the woman on the deck facing the water, and the painted eye with its little ankh beneath it turned toward the sluice gate as if it had some opinion about the tide.