Black and grey tattoo of a winged Egyptian goddess kneeling with outstretched wings, with a winged ankh above, across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged Egyptian goddess on a back

Traditional · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A kneeling Egyptian-style female figure in profile, wearing a collar and headdress, has large outstretched wings that span the upper back. Above her, a winged ankh is rendered in lighter grey with softer shading. The linework is bold and the wings are shaded with dark feathers and grey highlights, and the design is centred on the shoulder blades.

Traditional Back Wing Ankh Egyptian

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Marigold had carried coal up the Medway for forty years, and her hold still smelled of it when Nell Ashby took the tiller at fourteen. Her father had gone to the hospital at Strood with a crushed hand, and the skipper, a man called Pardoe who cheated at cards, said a girl could steer on the flood as well as any lad. Nell said nothing. She had watched the water all her life and knew where the mud shelved.

Keep reading

Halfway to Rochester the fog came down thick as wool. Pardoe lit the lamp and swore, and the barge drifted toward the piles of an old wharf. Nell heard a sound she could not place, a long soft beating like a sail shaking out. She remembered her grandmother saying that the river had a keeper, a woman who knelt on the water with her arms spread wide, and that she came for drowning men and for lost barges alike. Nell had thought it nonsense, the sort of thing said to keep children off the banks.

She put her hand on the tiller and let the sound guide her. Wings opened in the fog above the deck, grey and enormous, and beneath them a kneeling figure with her face turned to the bow looked steadily down the channel. Nell did not look up. She kept the Marigold where the figure looked, past the wharf, past the mud, until the lamps of the town showed through the murk. When she finally glanced back, there was only the river, and a smear of pale light on the water where the wings had been.

Pardoe never believed a word of it. The next spring Nell painted a small winged ankh on the bow, and nobody on the Medway asked her why.