Following the Egyptian uprisings of January 2011, Tahrir Square has served both as a public space and international stage. The rise of street art and graffiti in Cairo following this revolution has been well-documented in local and international media. While political street art was rare in Cairo before the events of 2011, an explosion of street art of varying quality has since occurred throughout the city. In particular, the walls surrounding Tahrir Square have become a living, ever-changing canvas for the city’s artists, an evolving museum to the revolution, and a self-conscious narration of political change. Acting as a backdrop to television coverage of the revolution, widely distributed through social media, and easily visible to those in the square, these murals have served as visual signals of shifting discontent. This paper considers the murals of Tahrir Square as palimpsests, whose layers may be peeled back to reveal a narrative of artistic discontent. As the nature of the “revolution” changed, so did the nature of this public art. Focusing on the changing depiction of martyrs in the streets of downtown Cairo, it considers the vacillations between hope and despair in the political goals of the artists. The collaborative nature of street art projects, role of social media in their dispersal, and disparate sources of artistic inspiration will be analyzed. Drawing on the graphic qualities of advertisements, the folk art traditions of hajj painting and pharaonic-themed murals, as well as the international street art tradition of spray paint and stencils, the martyr murals of downtown Cairo illustrate the multivalent sources of artistic inspiration, and shifting focus of discontent in the years following Mubarak’s departure.