Metallic gold and silver temporary tattoos of dots, triangles and diamonds on a forearm, with a Roman numeral band on the upper arm.

Metallic geometric temporary tattoos on arm

Geometric · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A close crop of a woman's arms, folded across her body, showing metallic temporary tattoos rather than permanent ink. On the forearm are a row of small dots, two rows of stacked triangles and a stepped diamond motif, and a band of Roman numerals wraps around the upper arm. The flat, reflective foil designs sit alongside metal bangles on the wrist, and the warm lighting emphasises the shine of the gold and silver tones.

Geometric Forearm Upper arm Dot Triangle Diamond Roman numeral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gold leaf had to go on before the damp came off the river, Mr Pryce said, or it would not take, so Nell was up before the milk carts, lifting squares of leaf onto her cushion with a brush the width of a fingertip while the shop windows were still grey. The commission was the clock on the old Corn Exchange, its Roman numerals gone dull under forty winters of soot. Pryce would not climb the ladder himself, not with his knee, so the job went to her, along with a pot of size, a roll of tissue-thin gold and instructions to write IIII, never IV, because that was how the town's first clockmaker had cut them and nobody had dared correct him since.

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She worked slowly, the way she had been taught. Each numeral took two coats of size and a careful breath before the leaf was pressed down and brushed flat. The offcuts drifted off her fingers like scraps of sunlight and she kept them in a saucer, because Pryce said a gilder who wasted nothing would never run short. Below her, Mrs Adey from the draper's stood with a basket on her arm and called up that her husband had been the one to repaint the numerals in 1936, in silver, because gold was too dear that year, and that he had hidden a pencilled tally of the days he had been out of work somewhere behind the minute hand. Nell did not find it. She found only the old silver flaking through the new gold, like a second face showing through the first.

By noon the last numeral was down. The sun came round over the market square and caught the dial, and for a minute every number blazed at once, so bright the pigeons lifted from the gutters. Nell stood on the ladder with her brush in her hand and watched the shadows of the iron hands crawl across the gold. Back in the workshop, Pryce swept the offcuts into his dish and held it up to the window, and they shone there like a handful of small coins that nobody had yet agreed to spend.