Black and grey realism tattoo of a pharaoh with a bird perched on his headdress, covering the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pharaoh portrait on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large portrait of an Egyptian pharaoh in a striped nemes headdress, with a bird perched on the crown and a ceremonial crook and flail crossing the chest. The linework is soft and the shading is smooth and detailed, with fine hatching in the fabric and strong highlights on the face. Pyramid-like shapes and cloud forms fade into the background, and the piece is entirely in black ink and greys.

Realism Upper arm Egyptian Headdress Bird Pyramid Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had held the ground like a lid for three weeks, so when Dad finally put the plough into the bottom field in February, the blade met something that rang instead of giving. Nell stood on the headland with her hands jammed in her coat and watched the earth split open, and a flat grey face looked up at the low sky as if it had been waiting to be asked.

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It was the size of a feed sack, a stone man with a pleated cloth falling either side of his cheeks. Across his chest lay a crook and a flail, the wood gone black with age, and on the crown sat a small bird with its wings folded, as if it had landed there to wait out the cold. Dad wanted him shifted before the lambing. The vicar's wife called him a gatepost. The man from the museum in Norwich came in a hire car, stood in the mud in the wrong shoes, and said the lines were older than anyone's grandmother and that the bird was a falcon.

They dragged him out with two tractor chains and a scaffold pole, and he sat on the trailer under a tarpaulin that night while the fields went white. Nell took a torch out to him. Beyond the hedge the pylons stood in a line like pale pyramids, and the cloud above them had torn open to show a sliver of moon. A real kestrel had come down onto the stone crown and sat there, hunched against the cold, its feathers the same grey as the carving.

In the morning the lorry came. The museum man signed for him on a clipboard, and Nell watched the crook slide out of sight under the straps. When she looked up the kestrel had gone too, and the bottom field lay open to the sky, the furrow still bright where the blade had cut.