Black and grey realism tattoo of a circular seal with a pyramid and eye on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pyramid and eye seal on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a circular seal with a stepped pyramid topped by an eye within a triangle, with rays behind it. Latin inscriptions around the rim and along the base read Annuit Coeptis and Novus Ordo Seclorum, with a Roman numeral date beneath the pyramid. The work uses black and grey shading with soft gradients across the background and a serrated outer border.

Realism Upper arm Pyramid Eye Ray Roman numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You wake to the bargee's knock and find the barge already sliding out of Thornwick lock, the water pewter-grey under a sky tearing open at the top. Ewan built the load overnight, a stepped pyramid of bricks lashed on the foredeck, each course set back a finger's width from the one below. The inspector at Ashby said a stack that tall had better look like it knew what it was doing. You don't tell Ewan it looks like a tomb. He'd say tombs don't float.

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The brass seal hangs from a nail by the tiller where your father left it: an eye inside a triangle above a stepped mound, ringed with Latin nobody on the cut can read. Your father translated it as a new order of the ages, then winked, because he said the canal company paid for the brass and not the meaning. You oil it anyway, the way you'd keep a dog you didn't quite trust.

At Hollins Cut the lock-keeper climbs down with his clipboard and asks where the bricks are bound. You hand over the manifest, the wax seal pressed red in one corner. He reads it twice, looks up at the stack, then at the sun coming through the poplars, and says the Stoke Lacey chapel has waited three winters for its roof. He stamps the page and waves you through without a second glance at the seal.

That evening you climb the stack to retie a loose line, and from the top course the whole cut opens out, the water holding the last light in one bright strip. The brick under your palm is cold, and when you turn it over there is a date pressed into the clay, MDCCLXXVI, the same numerals your teacher made you copy in chalk. It is older than the chapel, older than the cut, older than your father's joke. Below, Ewan shouts that the kettle's on. You stay a minute longer, counting the courses down.