Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gold and silver metallic temporary tattoos

Back · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows a woman seen from behind with her head turned away and her hands resting on her upper back and shoulder. Metallic gold ornamental designs cover her forearm and hand, and a silver band with ornate patterning sits on her upper arm. A silver and gold mandala with a symmetrical floral pattern is placed low on her back, and a red strap is visible against her skin.

Back Forearm Upper arm Mandala Floral pattern Ornament Metallic Hand Back Arm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

"Hold the lamp steady, girl. The leaf will not forgive a shaking hand." Maud Ferris had beaten gold in the back room of Chapel Row for forty years, and she still spoke to every sheet as though it might argue. The sheets came from Birmingham in little books of tissue, each one thinner than a held breath. She laid them on the cushion one at a time and lifted them with a knife no wider than a fingernail, and the apprentice, who was eleven and had been told the same thing every Tuesday since spring, moved the lamp a little further away.

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The woman who came in on the Thursday before Whitsun had a folded sheet of brown paper in her glove. On it someone had drawn a ring of eight petals, a bell of tracery around the rim, and a vine that curled out from the centre and lost itself at the edge. She wanted it cut in silver leaf and pressed onto a cloth, so it could be lifted onto a shoulder for the dance on the green. "It will be gone by Monday," Maud said. "Everything worth having goes by Monday." The woman only smiled and laid two shillings on the counter.

So Maud cut it. The knife went round each petal and the leaf came away in one piece, bright as a new coin, and the apprentice watched the rosette take shape under the lamp, round and exact, like something that had been there all along and only needed uncovering. "Why make a thing that washes off?" the girl asked. Maud wiped her knife on her apron. "Leaf is only ever lent. Gold knows it. That's why it's worth the lending."

On Monday the shop smelled of rain. The girl went out early to sweep the step and found, caught in a crack between the stones, a single petal of silver, thin as a fingernail paring and still bright. She pressed it flat with her thumb and kept it in her pocket, because Maud had said leaf was only ever lent, and some loans, it seemed, came back on their own.