Close view of a gold metallic leaf armlet design on the upper arm of a woman whose white open-back top shows black crossed straps.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gold leaf armlet tattoo on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A woman with blonde hair is photographed from behind, showing her back and left upper arm. A gold metallic design of overlapping leaves wraps around the upper arm in a band, with a fine outline and no shading. The black lines across the back are straps of a white open-back top, not ink, and the warm, soft natural light sits against a blurred green background.

Botanical Upper arm Leaves Metallic Gold Band Back Woman

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm has left the gold pot uncovered again, and by the time you reach the scriptorium the wind off the cloister garth has lifted three sheets from the bench and dropped them in the rain butt. You fish them out with a wooden spoon, peel the wet vellum from the leather, and sit down under the high window to save what you can before Prior Gilbert counts the day's leaves.

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The border you are working is a vine for the Easter psalter, one stem climbing the margin with leaves that overlap like scales on a fish. Each leaf must be laid in size, dusted with gold the width of a thumbnail, then edged in iron-gall ink so the eye reads it as metal and not paint. Anselm says the trick is to breathe on the leaf before you press it down. You try it, the leaf folds itself over your knuckle and sticks there, and when you flick it free a fleck of gold stays glued to the skin above your elbow, a bright band that lye will not shift.

Prior Gilbert comes in at none, grey-faced and quick, and stops at the spoiled sheet with its wet ripple. You say nothing about the rain. He holds the page to the window and turns it, and his thumb finds the vine where the leaves overlap in the right order, the gold catching the thin light like coins at the bottom of a well. 'Who gilded this?' he asks. You tell him the wind took a hand in it, and he almost smiles, which in Gilbert is a rare kind of weather.

That evening, at compline, the candles turn the chapter house to gold, and you catch your own arm in the light: the band of leaves shining above the elbow, uneven and perfect. Nobody else looks twice. Only Anselm notices, passing you the bread, and he taps the place where the gold has settled and says the vine has finally grown into you.