Gold metallic ornamental tattoos with swirls and dark jewel accents across a hand, wrist, upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gold ornamental temporary tattoos on arm and hand

Hand · Colour · Photo

A close crop shows a person's hand resting on their upper arm, with gold metallic ornamental designs across the hand, wrist, forearm, upper arm and shoulder. The fine, scrolling linework forms paisley-like motifs, filigree bands and small dark jewel shapes, and the metallic ink reads as gold against the skin. The background is soft green foliage, and a blue top sits at the edge of the frame.

Hand Forearm Upper arm Shoulder Ornamental Paisley Swirl Filigree Jewel Bracelet Armband

Find an artist for this

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

The gold leaf refused to lie flat in the wind coming off the quay, so I shut the workshop door and breathed through my teeth while I laid the last curl of wire. Mr Pell had taught me that filigree is only a line that refuses to stop. I had spent three weeks copying his old drawings for the widow Anstey, who wanted a cuff for her daughter's wedding and insisted it be made by hand, not by the machine in Plymouth.

Keep reading

The drawings were odd. Each scroll ended in a tiny dot, and when I laid the sheets side by side on the bench, those dots sat exactly where the lamps stood along the breakwater. Pell had never kept a light in his life. In the margin of the last sheet he had written, in his cramped hand, Walk the tide, not the road. I took it for a note about the wedding procession, which was to go down the old steps by the fish market.

On the Saturday I carried the finished bands up to the Anstey house in a cloth tied with string. The daughter was out on the water with her uncle and her mother did not pretend otherwise. She unwrapped the gold, turned the cuff over, and touched each dark jewel with the tip of a finger. Pell had made these for her grandmother, she said, the year the harbour lights were first switched on. Each dot was a place where a boat had come home.

Her mother fastened the cuff around her own wrist and held it up to the window. Down on the quay the lamp at the end of the breakwater came on early, one gold point and then the next, and for a moment the whole harbour seemed to be wearing the design. I packed my wire away and did not tell her that Pell's drawings had nearly gone to a man in Plymouth who wanted them for stamping transfers.