Black and grey shaded tattoo of a kneeling winged Egyptian figure with outstretched wings across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged Egyptian figure on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A kneeling figure in an Egyptian style, with a headdress and arms raised between two large outstretched wings, is tattooed centrally on the upper back. The wings are shaded with fine feather detail and the figure is outlined with soft grey shading. The tattoo is shown in black and grey ink against warm skin, photographed from behind with the head cropped out of frame.

Back Winged figure Egyptian Wing Headdress

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tent had more patches than canvas by the autumn of the Brisbane Road season, and Mr Okonedo kept saying the takings would turn, the way milk turns when someone leaves it by a window. I sat in the wardrobe wagon with a mouthful of pins and the wings of the Kneeling Lady across my knees. They were cut from waxed linen and feathered with two hundred goose quills that my mother had gathered from a farm outside Ipswich in 1961, and they were wider than my arms could span.

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Dorothea wore them on the plinth for twenty-two years. She knelt with her arms raised between the wings while the wire men hauled the frame up on its cables, and the lanterns dimmed until only the feathers caught any light at all. On a good night the front rows would stop chewing their toffee. On a Tuesday in October there were nine people in the stands, and a boy who counted the quills out loud in a whisper that carried to the ring.

Dorothea couldn't kneel any more. Her knees had gone the winter before, and nobody said so, but I heard the wires taking her weight when she tried, and I saw her hands shake. So I practised the lift myself after the last act, alone in the cold tent, with the canvas breathing above me and the pins going into my sleeve. The wings lifted. The linen groaned against the frame, and I stitched a loose quill back to the hem by torchlight so the whole thing might hold for one more night.

On the final evening the boy was back in the front row with his mother, and Dorothea sat in the wings with a blanket over her shoulders. I went up the ladder with the frame and the lanterns went down, and when the cables sang I raised my arms and the feathers opened over the empty ring like a door nobody had shut.