Gold and silver metallic temporary tattoos

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A woman with curly dark hair turns her head away, with her hands resting on her shoulder and upper back. Ornate henna-style scrolls, paisley shapes and dotted lines in metallic gold and silver sit on her forearm, wrist, hand and upper arm, and a round mandala design is on her back. The fine linework is shown in sharp focus against warm skin tones, with a red strap of clothing running down the frame.

Forearm Upper arm Hand Back Mandala Scroll Paisley Swirl Armband Dotted line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Oda Penhallow kept her gold leaf in a tin box lined with cotton, and she never laid a sheet on skin without breathing on it first. People came from three valleys for her work: scrolls that curled over wrists like bindweed, paisley drops that caught the lamp, dotted lines that ran from knuckle to fingertip like a row of tiny stars. Her one rule was that a pattern must be finished before the evening bell, or it would sit wrong on the skin for a year.

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One November a boy called Tobias Greave came in with a silver ring pinched between his finger and thumb. It had been his mother's, and she had lost it down the well behind the chapel. He had no coin, so he offered a month of carrying water up the hill. Oda took the ring, filed it to a glitter, and mixed the dust with egg white and vinegar. She painted a lotus across the back of his hand, eight petals and a centre like a seed head, working by one candle while the wind pushed at the shutters.

She finished as the bell began. Tobias looked at his hand and laughed, and went home without paying. By the time the frost went out of the ground, the silver had worn away to nothing, and his mother was clearing the well. She brought up a bucket of mud, rinsed it in the trough, and found her ring bright as the day it fell, lying in the stones at the bottom.

Oda's rule had a second half, which she never told customers. Every April Oda climbs the hill with a little tin, and at the well's lip she finds a single curl of silver, thin as a hair, waiting for her to take it back.