Black line drawing of the Eye of Ra, an ankh and the Eye of Horus, with English and German captions beneath each symbol.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eye of Ra, ankh and Eye of Horus symbols

Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing shows three Egyptian symbols arranged in a row: the Eye of Ra on the left, an ankh in the centre and the Eye of Horus on the right. Each symbol has small captions in English and German giving its name and meaning, such as the sun god Ra, the moon god Horus, and symbol of life. The image uses plain black linework on a white background with no shading or colour.

Eye of horus Ankh Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Just gone two on the night shift at the Dover booth, and the woman in the grey coat had handed me her passport with a sketchbook balanced on top of it, as if it were part of the paperwork. I opened it because that is what the job makes you do. On the first page were three drawings in fine black ink: an eye on the left, a cross with a loop for a top in the middle, an eye on the right. Someone had written small capitals underneath. RA. LIFE. HORUS.

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'My father drew those,' she said, before I asked. 'He bound books in Alexandria for forty years. He said the left eye was the sun going down and the right was the moon coming up, so one looked after the day and one looked after the night, and you needed both to get anywhere.' I asked where she was going. Hamburg, to a cousin who had not been well. She said it the way people say a thing they have practised in the car. Behind her a lorry driver was tapping his steering wheel and the queue lights were going amber.

I turned the pages slowly. Most were lists in a neat hand: flights, dates, the names of trains. On the inside of the back cover, in pencil and a different hand, someone had written Das Auge and under it Schutz, and beside it a smaller ankh, pressed so hard the paper had dimpled. 'My sister,' she said. 'She learned German for the cousin. She wrote that years ago and never rubbed it out.' I stamped the form and slid everything back across the counter.

'Go on, then,' I said. She put the book inside her coat, against her chest, and the barrier lifted for her the way it does for nobody else that night. In my mirror I watched her walk out under the sodium lights with one hand flat over the pocket, as if she were keeping watch for the both of them.