Blue and silver ornamental temporary tattoos on a forearm and both hands, photographed on a beach with rocks behind.

Blue and silver temporary tattoos on arms and hands

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The photograph is cropped to a torso and arms, showing ornamental designs in blue and silver on the forearms and the backs of the hands. The designs include mandala-style star motifs, scrollwork, leaf shapes and small dotted lines, drawn with fine outlines and little shading. Blue and metallic silver ink sit on tanned skin, with a sandy beach and rocky shoreline blurred in the background.

Forearm Hand Mandala Ornament Scrollwork Star Leaf Dot Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week out from Fremantle the chart had gone soft at the folds, so I pinned it flat with the cook's tin of tea and a pair of brass dividers Ines swore had belonged to her grandfather. Nobody else aboard the Marguerite could read the pencil dots I'd laid down since Cape Leeuwin, a line of them running west through the empty blue, and Ines liked to tease me that I drew my course like someone stitching a hem.

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The star was the thing I trusted. Someone had inked an eight-pointed rose in the margin of the old Admiralty sheet, blue on blue, with silver paint gone dull at the edges, and every night I took my sights and pricked the true bearing against its points. The shape of it reminded Ines of the tiles in her mother's kitchen in Lisbon, which was the only reason she let me keep it on the wall.

On the nineteenth day the wind died, and the sea lay so flat that the foam around the bow looked painted on. We sat under the awning with the chart between us. Ines counted the dots aloud, the way she counted rosary beads, and I realised the line was not a road at all but a tally: one small mark for each morning we had woken to the same grey horizon and decided to keep going.

When the wind came back at dawn, I took a silver pencil from the drawer and set one more dot beyond the last, a fine point at the edge of the star. Ines looked at it for a long time. Then she said the land would be there by Thursday and the tea was cold, and I believed her on both counts.