Black and grey pharaoh portrait tattoos with striped nemes headdresses on two forearms, with the hands clasped together.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pharaoh portraits on two forearms

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms carry black and grey tattoos of Egyptian pharaoh figures wearing striped headdresses, with the eyes and collar detailed. The left arm's design is larger and softer, with grey shading and fine vertical stripes across the headdress. The image is taken in a car interior with the hands clasped, and the tattoos are the main subject.

Realism Forearm Egyptian Headdress Portrait Eye Collar

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate had come up from London on the Tuesday goods train, and by Thursday Mr Pardoe had decided that making the plaster look like stone was your job. "Grey, not white," he said, tapping the lid with his pipe. "Nobody in Market Deeping wants a ghost on the wall of the Corn Exchange." So you mixed lamp black with linseed and a little size, and you sat on an upturned orange box while the two figures lay on sacking under the skylight, one long and narrow, one broad at the shoulders.

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The headdress was the hard part. Someone long dead had cut the pleats into the cast with a fine blade, and the light came in low across them so that every stripe threw a shadow the width of a hair. You worked from the crown down, following the folds until they reached the collar, where a row of rounded beads sat like a necklace of pebbles. Your brush kept slipping. Outside, the bell for the twelve o'clock train rang twice and you ignored it.

On the Friday the widow came in with a flask of tea and stood behind you for a long time. She said her husband had bought the pieces at a sale in Liverpool in 1921, that he had never once let anyone touch them with paint, and that he would have hated the grey. Then she asked which way the eyes were looking, and you realised you had not checked. You stepped back and tilted your head. Both figures stared past the stacked chairs and the door, toward the road that ran south to the station.