Gold metallic temporary tattoos of a sun and dotted lace bands on a raised forearm and hand, with a peace sign against a pale sky.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gold metallic temporary tattoos on wrist and hand

Geometric · Forearm · Colour · Photo

Raised arms show gold metallic temporary tattoos, including a sunburst motif on the back of the hand, dotted lace bands across the wrist and forearm, and small geometric shapes. The designs are flat, outlined in gold, and sit against a plain white sky with a strip of water and shoreline below. The composition is cropped to the arms and the back of a head, with the bright gold tone dominating the frame.

Geometric Forearm Hand Sun Sunburst Dot Lace pattern Diamond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Pelham kept the gold leaf in a small cardboard book, and he never let me touch it with my fingers, only with the flat wooden knife he called the lifter. By the time I was sixteen I could lay a sunburst on the transom of a fishing boat without a single ray going crooked. That was the summer the harbour council wanted the front of the Lucky Dove repainted for the regatta, and the skipper's wife wanted a sun on the stern to match her brooch.

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We worked from a brass compass and a pencil, pricking the rim of each ray with a nail point so the lace of the border would hold. Mr Pelham said gilding was only waiting done properly. He would pad the size with the side of his thumb until it went tacky, then lay the leaf and brush away the overspill with a squirrel-hair tail. Everything else in Ashby Bay was grey: the sky, the shingle, the nets drying on their poles. The gold made people squint.

On the last morning the skipper's wife came down to check the work. She stood in the wet sun with her hand over her eyes and said nothing for a long while. Then she asked whether the gold would last through a winter. I told her the truth, that leaf on wood outlasts most promises, and Mr Pelham cuffed the back of my head for it.

She laughed, a proper laugh, and paid him in notes folded small. He gave me a shilling and the tin of size to take home, and I still have it. When the Lucky Dove finally went down off the point in '61, the sun was the last thing to show above the water, bright as a coin under the tide.