Black and grey tattoo of an Egyptian pharaoh head in a striped nemes headdress on the middle finger of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pharaoh head on a middle finger

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of an Egyptian pharaoh's head wearing a striped nemes headdress sits on the middle finger. The face and headdress are rendered in fine black linework with grey shading. The hand rests on a pale blue striped towel, with black and white striped nail art and red nails visible beside it.

Hand Egyptian Portrait Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okonedo had kept the pawnshop on Cheapside for thirty-one years, and she had never once let a man see her count the rings twice. So when Dev brought the tray up from the back room that Tuesday, she took the magnifier from her cardigan pocket and held it over the one small brass signet without speaking.

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"It isn't brass," she said eventually. "Look at the nemes. Those stripes are cut by hand, every one of them the width of a hair."

Dev leaned in. On the flat face of the signet, no bigger than a fingernail moon, a pharaoh looked back at him with heavy-lidded calm, his striped headdress falling to the shoulders in neat grey ridges. Someone had engraved it with a needle and patience, then rubbed soot into the lines so they would hold.

"Who would bring this in?" Dev asked.

"Someone who wanted it kept, not sold." She set the ring down on a square of felt and tapped it once. "Write the ticket. Pawn it for a year, and if nobody comes, we'll see what the face is worth to somebody who likes small things."

That evening Dev walked the long way home past the river, the ring wrapped in a twist of tissue in his coat pocket. He thought of the engraver bent over a bench in some hot workshop, working the stripes into metal one at a time, never expecting a shop in the rain to be where the work ended up. He touched the tissue once more, kept walking, and felt the small striped face warm against his palm.