Two overlapping pencil sketches of a woman in an Egyptian-style nemes headdress with a cobra, hoop earrings and a beaded collar, taped to paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Egyptian-style woman portrait design sketch

Black and grey · Flash

Two overlapping sketches show a woman in profile wearing a striped nemes headdress decorated with a cobra at the brow. She has hoop earrings, a beaded collar and a defined eye and lip line, drawn in bold outlines with light shading on the face and headdress. The drawings are in blue and grey pencil or ink on paper, with one sheet laid over the other and held at the top with black tape.

Woman Collar Profile Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mo had been tracing for three hours when the tea went cold beside the light box. The sheet in front of her was the fourth copy of the same profile, and each one had come out a little heavier than the last, the lines thickening where old pencil had smudged. Her uncle's handwriting ran along the margin: Keep the cobra's hood open. Customers want to see it rear.

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She laid the tracing paper over the earlier sketch and lined up the nemes, its stripes falling in neat bars above the ear. The cobra sat at the brow, coiled once, its head lifted as if it had only just noticed the room. Her uncle had drawn it that way in 1987 for a sailor who never came back for it, and the flash had hung above the autoclave ever since, curling at the corners like a saint's picture in a damp church.

The ghost lines showed through from underneath, a second jaw and a second collar of beads sitting a finger's width away from the first. Mo studied them until the hum of the light box filled the whole room. Then she took a fine nib and drew the cobra's eye open, turned its head toward the woman's face instead of away, and let the hood flare just once where her uncle would have said no.

When she lifted the top sheet, the two drawings lay on the glass together, one fainter than the other. She wrote her initials small beneath the lowest bead of the collar, where nobody would look unless they were checking the work, and pinned the copy to the wall beside his.