Black and grey realism tattoo of an Egyptian pharaoh mask with a striped nemes headdress on the upper arm.

Pharaoh death mask tattoo on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo depicts an Egyptian funerary mask style face wearing a striped nemes headdress, with a chin piece and a broad collar of layered bands across the chest. Soft grey shading models the face and eyes, while heavy black stripes define the headdress pleats and collar. The design fills most of the frame on the upper arm, with skin tone and a white garment visible at the edges.

Realism Upper arm Headdress Portrait Collar

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carver in Morrow Quay had been asked for a face that would not tarnish, and he did not argue with the widow who brought him the order. Her husband Obed had gone out past the breakwater in the autumn gale and the sea had kept him. She did not want him buried under his own name carved on a board. She wanted a mask, gold where the lamp caught it, with the heavy lids and the straight mouth of a man who had decided something and would not be moved.

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The carver worked through the winter. He hammered the brow out of brass sheet and cut the stripes of the headcloth from thin copper, folding each pleat by hand so that they fell the way a sail falls when the wind has dropped. He laid grey enamel over the eyes because gold looked wrong there, too bright for a man who had spent his life squinting at weather. When the last band of the collar was riveted on, he held the mask up to the window and found that the eyes had caught the light and seemed to look past him, out towards the harbour mouth.

In the spring Bessie came down to the quay with the mask wrapped in a fisherman's oilcloth. The tide was turning and the boats were coming in low with their catch. She set the mask on the harbour wall, face to the water, and she did not weep, because the tale of the town says she had done that already. The gulls that had been fighting over the scraps on the stones lifted all at once and went out over the water, and nobody on the quay said a word until the last of them had gone quiet over the sea.