Close-up of a gold metallic henna-style design with black accents across the back of a hand and along the forearm, on dark skin.

Gold henna-style design on hand and forearm

Hand · Colour · Photo

Two hands rest together, showing a gold metallic design of ornate paisley and scrollwork motifs over the back of the hand, fingers and forearm. Black teardrop-shaped gems sit within the pattern, and small gold dots run up the top of the hand. The fine, symmetrical linework is in gold ink, set against blue fabric and a blurred green background.

Hand Forearm Paisley Scrollwork Filigree Teardrop Gem Dot Leaf Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lacquer box had been in Amara's family for three generations, and it was the only thing her grandmother had insisted on carrying out of the flat in Lahore before the boat. Inside, under a folded square of blue cotton, lay a brass pen with a dried-up nib and a pot of gold paint no bigger than a thimble. Nobody in the new house on Wetherby Road knew what it was for. Amara found out on the third wet Sunday of the autumn, when the damp got into the kitchen and her cousin Shreya came round crying about a boy who had not written back.

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"Give me your hand," Amara said, and Shreya, who had never once in her life done as she was told, held it out palm down without a word of argument. The paint was cold. The nib dragged a little on the skin, then ran smooth as the first line curled out from the wrist, a paisley teardrop that swelled and narrowed like a seed pod. Scrollwork spilled across the knuckles. At the top of the fingers, Amara dotted a row of tiny gold points, one for every year they had been apart.

When the paint dried it shone like something lit from inside. Shreya turned her hand over and over under the kitchen bulb. "It won't wash off," she said, half accusing.

"It will," Amara said. "Gold always comes off in the end. That's what it's for. You get to be looked at for a week without having to keep it."

Shreya laughed properly for the first time that day, and the boy's silence seemed to shrink to the size of a dot on a finger.