Black and grey traditional style tattoo of a jackal-headed figure within an oval striped frame with an ankh below, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Jackal-headed figure and ankh on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A jackal-headed figure with pointed ears and a fanged snout sits inside an oval frame with a striped border, and an ankh extends from the bottom of the oval. The linework is bold and black, with grey shading on the head and the striped band giving depth. The tattoo is shown in close view on a pale arm against white paper, with a small tattoo partly visible at the lower left edge.

Traditional Forearm Ankh Egyptian Oval frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the dogs' names before you learn the coal seams. Old Hughie Lorimer keeps a jackal on the wall of the lamp room, a sheet of tin he cut and nailed above the hooks, blackened with soot and lamp oil, its ears pricked toward the cage door. He says a man who came back from Cairo with the army gave it to him, and that it watches who goes down and who comes up. You think it is superstition until the night the roof comes in on the east face of Number Four and the lamp room is the only place in the valley anyone can find a light.

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You are the deputy that shift, so the tally board is yours. Brass checks hang from every man's nail, and each one is cut in the shape of a loop with a bar beneath, which Hughie swore was an old key for a door that opens only once. You count the checks coming up the shaft in the rescue cage, one at a time, calling names into the dust. Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Then the count stops at thirty-nine, and there is a check still hanging on the board with no body under it.

You go down again with a stretcher and a bad knee, and you find the boy from the stables sitting against a prop with his lamp gone out and his hands folded on his chest like someone in a chapel. He has been in the dark for six hours and has not once cried for his mother, because he was waiting for the jackal to come and weigh him. You tell him the jackal has already weighed him and found him light enough to carry.

In the morning the lamp room smells of wet wool and carbolic. Hughie is polishing the tin figure with the hem of his shirt. You take down the brass check that was missing, thread it onto your own belt, and hang your lamp from the loop at the top of the ankh, where it swings a little whenever the cage goes past.