Black dotwork tattoo of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti in profile, wearing her crown, on the inner forearm, with another hand holding the arm.

Nefertiti bust in dotwork on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A profile bust of Nefertiti in her tall flat-topped crown, with a banded headdress, earring and broad collar. The face and collar are built from fine stippled dots and shading, framed by a bold black outline. The design is shown in black and grey, centred on the arm with plain skin around it and a dark background at the right edge.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The plaster queen hung above the lamp room door at Hollin Pit for as long as anyone could remember, her tall flat-topped crown furred grey with the same coal dust that worked into every collar and cuff. You were nine when Mr Ostler first handed you a shaving brush and told you she was not to be washed, only brushed, because water would soften the plaster and she would slump like wet bread. He called her Nefertiti. The cast had come from a museum in Berlin, sent to the Miners' Welfare by a man who had once been a bugler in the war and never stopped writing letters.

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You brushed her every Friday after the shift whistle, working the bristles into the fine stippling of her cheek and collar, where the dust settled deepest. She did not seem to mind. Her eyes looked past the pithead wheel towards the valley, as if she were waiting for a train that had stopped running years before. The men tapped their lamps against her base for luck on the way to the cage, and nobody thought to ask whether a queen could be lucky for anyone but herself.

In the spring the owners put a notice on the chapel door. By June the wheel was still, and the men came up the hill with their tins and their silence. You climbed on the bench to reach her, and the dust fell into your collar as you worked the crown loose from its wire. Mr Ostler watched from the step and said nothing for a long while. Then he lifted her by the shoulders and you took her feet, and together you wrapped her in an old sack that smelled of oil.

You carried her up to the top road and set her on the drystone wall, facing the empty headframe with her profile turned to the sky. Before you left, you brushed her cheek one last time. The grey did not come away. It only made her look as if she had been out in the weather with everyone else.

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