Gold and silver metallic tattoo of lace and mandala patterns around an ankle and lower leg, with bare feet on sand.

Metallic ankle band on a bare leg

Ankle · Colour · Photo

A bare leg and foot stand on sand, with a metallic gold and silver design on the ankle and lower leg. A band of lace-like scalloped edging sits above a gold mandala-style band, and a vertical silver ornamental chain of loops and dots runs down the shin. The warm, sunlit tones of the skin and the sand make the metallic finish stand out, and the design appears to be a temporary metallic tattoo.

Ankle Anklet Lace Mandala Ornament Paisley Dot Foot Sand Beach Metallic

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide had already taken the gold by the time Nell came back up the beach, though neither of us knew it yet. I was behind the stall with the wooden tray of transfers, counting sheets that had gone soft in the damp air, and I remember thinking how the low sun turned everything the colour of barley sugar.

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My grandmother cut every design in the back room of the shop in Penhallow, bent over the bench with a nail file and a tin of gilt. The scalloped lace was for keeping the sea out, she used to say, though it never did. The mandala band she copied from a tray her brother brought home from Jaipur in 1952, and she never once let anyone else touch the silver. The long chain of loops and dots was her favourite, the one she said had been drawn by someone who was going somewhere and meant to come back.

Nell chose the chain. I peeled it carefully from its backing, pressed it to the skin, and rubbed it warm with my thumb until the shape took. She told me she was catching the evening ferry and wouldn't see it fade, and I said that was just as well, because it wouldn't last a week in salt water anyway. She laughed and walked off along the tideline with the sun behind her, and the loops caught the light all the way down.

When I tidied the tray that night I found one spare silver chain still stuck to its backing, folded at the corner. I didn't press it onto anything. I left it in the drawer under the till, where my grandmother kept the things she intended to finish later, and in the morning the sea had smoothed every footprint on the sand outside as if no one had ever stood there.