Sheet of gold metallic temporary tattoo designs on white, showing an elephant with a mandala, a hamsa hand, a mandala flower and chain-style borders.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gold metallic temporary tattoo sheet

Colour · Flash

A white sheet printed with gold metallic temporary tattoo designs. It includes an elephant head with a floral mandala, a hamsa hand with swirling filigree, a large mandala flower, and vertical chain-like ornamental strips and borders. The linework is fine and solid in gold ink, with ornament filling each design and no shading.

Elephant Mandala Lotus Flower Chain Filigree Border Temporary tattoo

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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

You find the sheet on the counter at Pulli harbour, wedged between a tray of coconut-shell combs and a jar of tamarind paste, and your aunt Revathi is already saying the gold ink came from a shop in Kochi that closed when the tourists stopped coming. You know better. It came from the drawer under the till, where she keeps everything that might one day be worth a rupee. The ferry horn sounds twice across the lagoon, and you have until it sounds a third time to decide which pieces are sellable and which are for you.

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The elephant in the top corner is the one nobody buys. Its trunk curls up into a lotus, and its forehead is so crowded with mandala lace that visitors take it for a jewelled crown. Revathi calls it the mayor. You peel it off the way she taught you, damp cloth then a steady press, and it comes away whole, so thin you can see the paper through the gold. You carry it down to the slipway, where old Joseph is scraping weed from the hull of the Mary Dhanam, and ask if he wants it.

He squints at the elephant, then at the hamsa hand, and laughs. "Gold on a boat is bad luck. It wants to be paint or nothing." But he takes the hand anyway and asks you to press it to the bow, palm up, fingers spread toward the sea where the first wave will hit it. Your thumb holds one corner while the cloth goes over, and the eye in the palm stares out at the lagoon as if it has been expecting you.

Launch is on the next morning's tide. Half the island comes down to watch the Mary Dhanam slide into the water with a sound like a held breath let go, and you stand on the wall with the rest, certain the gold will be gone by noon. It isn't. When the boat turns in the channel, the sun finds the hamsa on her bow and throws it back across the water, bright as a new coin, and Revathi, beside you, says nothing for once.