Close crop of a woman wearing gold metallic botanical scroll tattoos on her upper chest and an ornate gold filigree tattoo across her hand and wrist, against green leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gold leaf and filigree temporary tattoos on chest and wrist

Botanical · Chest · Colour · Photo

A woman wears gold metallic temporary tattoos: a pair of leafy scroll motifs sits on the upper chest, and an ornate filigree band with a geometric centre runs from the back of the hand over the wrist. The linework is solid and decorative with no shading, and the gold ink is the only colour in the frame. The composition is cropped below the lips, with a white off-shoulder top and green foliage behind.

Botanical Chest Hand Forearm Leaves Scroll Filigree Ornament Gold Foliage Chest piece

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gold would not lie flat that morning, and Brother Anselm blamed the damp coming up off the fen. I held the gilder's knife steady while he breathed on the leaf, and the sheet lifted from its cushion like something that wanted to fly off the table and into the rafters.

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The scrolls were for the margin of the Hours of St Wenna, a vine of acanthus curling out from the great capital letter. Anselm taught me to prick the filigree with a needle and a wheel, each tiny hole a breath of space so the light could pass through the gold and make it glow like a lamp behind shutters. He never let me draw the diamond at the heart of the design. That belonged to the abbot's own hand, and the abbot was slow, so the diamond stayed empty on the page for three weeks while the leaves piled up beside us.

On the last evening, Sister Hild came down to the scriptorium with a strip of cloth and asked whether we had any spare gold. The Lady of Coldharbour was to be married at Candlemas and wanted a cuff of gilt vine for her wrist, and she had heard the house could do such things. Anselm laughed until he coughed, then took the strip, pressed a fresh leaf onto it with a wet thumb, and set the diamond himself in one clean stroke.

The gold came off the cloth by morning, rubbed away by the bride's own sleeve. The vellum, though, still holds its vine and its empty diamond, and Anselm used to say that gold on skin lasts a day while gold on a page outlasts the house that made it. I have never been sure he believed that. He kept the spare leaves in a tin with the lid tied down, all the same.