Black and grey tattoo of a winged scarab beetle beneath an ankh, with hieroglyphs and Egyptian motifs around it, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged scarab with ankh on an upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large winged scarab beetle sits at the centre, with an ankh above it and a cartouche-style panel of hieroglyphs below. The surrounding background is filled with smaller Egyptian motifs, including carved figures and symbols. The shading is black and grey, with fine stippling and soft tonal gradients on the wings and beetle body, and the image is repeated in mirrored panels across the frame.

Upper arm Ankh Wing Egyptian Beetle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Haskins wanted the scarab bigger than anything else on Lower High Street, so I spent three nights on a stepladder outside the Regal with a jam jar of turpentine balanced on the bottom rung. The town came out after the last picture to watch me work. Nobody in Carrow Bridge had seen a beetle with wings before, and half of them thought it was an advertisement for a insurance company.

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I had copied the design from a library book with its spine held on by string, pages full of tomb paintings and carved men with bird heads. Each morning I shaded the wings in slate grey, dabbing with a rag so the feathers looked like pressed cloth, then came back with my finest sable for the ankh hung above the beetle like a key to a door nobody had locked. Below it I drew a cartouche and filled it with rows of little owls and reed shapes that meant nothing to me at all.

Haskins's brother-in-law, Dennis Pryce, climbed up on the Thursday and asked whether I could fit his name in the oval. I told him the hieroglyphs were very old and very particular. He said he was paying for the paint. So I wrote out DENNIS in a row of cats and feathers, and he stood under it grinning for a fortnight until a man from the council pointed out that it said something about a loaf of bread.

Every evening after that the bulbs came on around the beetle's wings and it pushed its little sun across the front of the Regal, the way the book said it did. Dennis never asked me what the cartouche really said, and I never told him. It was the only part of the job I was proud of.