Black and grey traditional tattoo of a woman wearing a striped Egyptian nemes headdress with a feather ornament, on an arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Egyptian woman in striped headdress

Traditional · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo shows a woman's face framed by a striped nemes headdress, with a feather and round ornament at the top and a beaded collar below. The linework is bold and solid, with flat black areas for the headdress stripes and softer grey shading on the face and neck. The design fills most of the frame against pale skin, with part of another dark tattoo visible at the left edge.

Traditional Woman Feather Egyptian Portrait Collar

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Nile Palais had been packing them in since the papers printed photographs of the tomb at Luxor, and Mr Gedge credited the headdress for most of it. It hung on a hook behind the cloakroom, a stiff nemes of black and cream calico over cardboard, with a peacock feather pushed through the brow band and a beaded collar folded in tissue beside it. Only Lottie Frane was allowed to wear it for the Egyptian numbers on Saturday nights, and only after she had lined up the stripes with a ruler.

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On the last Saturday in March the hook was empty. Lottie searched the cloakroom, the gents' landing and the stockroom under the stage while the band ran through "Yes Sir, That's My Baby" for the third time. She found the feather first, bent flat in the gutter outside the side door, then the nemes folded under a crate of soda syphons. Someone had tried to straighten the stripes with a wet cloth and made them worse.

She did not ask who had taken it. Instead she sat on the crate, smoothed the calico across her knees and coaxed the feather back into shape with the edge of a hatpin, the way her mother had once saved a good hat from the rain. When Mr Gedge came looking, he found her already wearing it, the collar fastened at her throat, the lamp from the stage laying black bars across the cobbles.

"That's nearer the mark," he said, and for once he did not sound as if he were selling anything. Lottie went back up the stairs with the band still playing, and when she stepped into the light, the stripes ran across the dance floor like shadows of the old kings, and nobody in the hall thought to ask whose costume it was.