Black ink tattoo of five Egyptian hieroglyphs stacked in a vertical line down a person's upper back, including an ankh, two lions and a falcon.

Vertical Egyptian hieroglyph tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a person's upper back, with the head and face out of view, showing a vertical column of five small black hieroglyph-style tattoos. From top to bottom they show an ankh, a recumbent lion, a curved horn-like sign, a second recumbent lion and a seated falcon. The lines are solid black with clean outlines and no shading, and the composition is centred on the spine with a thin silver chain crossing the shoulders above.

Back Ankh Lion Bird Column

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every evening the lamp-keeper at Sallow Cross walked the platform with his tin of paraffin, and every evening the two stone lions by the footbridge watched him go past. They had come up from a quarry in the north on a flatbed nobody had ordered, and the railway set them on plinths either side of the stairs because the stationmaster's wife said the place looked bare. Her husband said they were ugly. Nobody thought about them much after that, except the children, who climbed on their backs when the porters weren't looking.

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Tomas Reyes, who had kept the lamps since the war, told the boy Idris the old story while they trimmed wicks in the lamp room. The lions faced opposite ways so that one could see what had gone and the other what was coming. Between them sat the bird on the signal box roof, and the little iron cross hanging from the lamp hook was the key that opened any gate that had been shut. Idris didn't believe a word of it, but he liked the telling, and he liked how cold the cross was when Tomas pressed it into his palm.

The following Friday Idris's mother was taken ill in Carlisle, and the last train north left at nine forty with a seat nobody else wanted. He stood between the lions with the cross in his pocket and felt foolish. Then the nearer lion seemed to yawn the way a dog does at the end of a long walk, and the bird on the signal box turned its head towards him. Idris laughed, showed his ticket to the guard, and was on the train before the bell.

Tomas found the cross on the plinth the next morning, warm from the sun, and left it there for whoever came next.