Two bare ankles on sand wearing metallic gold and silver temporary tattoos of hibiscus flowers, wavy lines, shells and a dotted band.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gold and silver metallic ankle tattoos

Ankle · Colour · Photo

Two bare feet rest on sand, each ankle decorated with metallic temporary tattoos. The left ankle shows gold hibiscus flowers above wavy gold lines, and the right ankle shows gold and silver shell designs above a silver dotted band. The foil designs are flat and graphic, and the warm metallic tones stand out against the tanned skin and pale sand.

Ankle Hibiscus Flower Shell Wave Dot Metallic

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The herring came in the week my uncle Joe brought back a sheet of foil from Lisbon, the kind the market women wrapped round sweets and sold for a penny at the harbour kiosk. He pressed it flat on the kitchen table and cut it with my mother's sewing scissors into flowers, waves and little spiralled shells, then told me anything gold on the skin would keep the sea off for a day.

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We had nine boats out of Porthgwen that autumn and only four came home with full holds. Dad's boat, the Marigold, was not one of the early ones, so each evening I walked the slipway with a bucket of cockles and a strip of silver foil I'd been saving, fastening it on where the wind bit. Mrs Penhallow from the net loft said I'd bring the boat home by wearing it, and I didn't argue, because nobody argues with the net loft.

The Marigold came round the headland on the third night, low in the water and slow, her sails patched grey. Dad stepped onto the stones and looked at the foil on my wrist before he looked at my face, then laughed until he had to sit down on a creel. The gold hibiscus had already flaked off in the spray, and the waves had smudged into the sand.

He had a bag of shells in his coat, spirals and one mother-of-pearl cockle the size of a palm. He pressed the cockle into my hand and said the bay had sent a better charm than Uncle Joe's, and it had cost nothing but a bad week. I kept the shell. The foil I let go, and the ebbing tide carried it past the breakwater, glinting like a fish turning over before it sinks.