Black and grey line drawing of a falcon-headed Eye of Horus with fine hatched feathers, dotted tails and lotus-like terminals, shown as a standalone design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Falcon-headed Eye of Horus design

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised falcon head in profile forms the Eye of Horus, with a large almond-shaped eye and a curling wing and tail. The feathers, wing and tail are filled with dense hatching, cross-hatching and rows of dots, with solid black accents for contrast. The design is drawn in black ink and greys on a plain white background, with the lower ends finished as ornate, lotus-like shapes.

Eye of horus Eye Feather Egyptian Wing Lotus

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire won't hold the reed-cold off you for long. You want the one about Ankhwi and the falcon on the granary roof? Then hush, and listen for the sack-seller's cough, because he always comes in at the wrong part.

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Ankhwi weighed barley for the village of Peh-Sedjet, where the river bends so tight that the boats turn round in their own wake. Every dusk a falcon sat on the granary ridge and watched him work. It was a thin bird with a wing like a sickle blade, and each evening, while he tipped the last measure into the store, it dropped down, snatched a single grain from the scale pan and flew off over the marsh. Ankhwi shouted. He threw clay at it. The falcon only tilted its head, and the look it gave him was the look a tax clerk gives a man who cannot read his own tally.

So one night he stopped shouting and followed it. Through the papyrus, through the black water where the frogs went silent, to a clearing with a lotus pond and a heap of seed husks as high as a child. The falcon stood on the heap, and beside it lay a basket of tally sticks, every one notched with the years the village had been short-weighed by the overseers. Hundreds of notches. Ankhwi had never once counted them.

The bird pecked the last grain from its beak, dropped it on the pile, and looked at him with that wide, patient eye. He understood then. It was not stealing from the village. It was carrying back what had been taken, one grain at a time, so the scale would come true again.