Seventh Son of A Seventh Son - Cover Art

Cover Art

According to Rod Smallwood, the band's manager, the brief given to Derek Riggs (the group's then regular artist) was, unlike with previous albums, to create "simply something surreal and bloody weird". Riggs confirms that "They said they wanted one of my surreal things. 'It's about prophecy and seeing into the future and we want one of your surreal things.' That was the brief ... I had a limited time to do the picture, and I thought it was pretty weird their concept, so I just went with that."

According to Dickinson, his revitalised enthusiasm, brought about by Harris' idea to make a concept album, carried forward into the cover artwork, saying that "I was probably responsible in a large part for the cover, with Derek." Dickinson states that the idea to set the painting in a polar landscape may have originated from when he showed Riggs a Gustave Doré piece, depicting traitors frozen in a lake of ice in the ninth circle of Dante's Inferno. Contradictory to this, Riggs states that the setting was because he "might have just seen a documentary about the North Pole or something ... I wanted something that was a departure from all the cityscapes and things. It was about prophecy and seeing the future, and so I just wanted something distant. And then they said, on the back, 'Could you stick all the other Eddie's in the ice?' So I did."

Speaking about the depiction of the band's mascot, Eddie, Riggs states that "I thought, you know, I don't feel like painting all of Eddie, so I'll get rid of him. I'll chop him off, and make it look kind of non-pleasant." In addition to the lobotomy and cyborg enhancements, left over from the Piece of Mind and Somewhere in Time album covers respectively, this incarnation also comes with a baby in his left hand and an apple, inspired by the Garden of Eden and featuring a red and green yin and yang. On top of this, Eddie's head is on fire, which Riggs states is "a symbol for inspiration," an idea which he "stole" from Arthur Brown.