A woman's back and upper arm decorated with gold and silver metallic temporary tattoos of an anchor, chevrons, arrows and a diamond chain, against a white background.

Metallic gold and silver temporary tattoos on back

Geometric · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A bare back and upper arm, with a hand resting on the shoulder, carry metallic gold and silver temporary tattoos. The designs include an anchor, a vertical chain of diamond shapes, a lotus, arrows, chevrons, triangles and a feather, all rendered as flat foil with no visible shading. The gold tones dominate, with silver accents, set against a plain white background with the figure's face turned away from the camera.

Geometric Upper arm Back Hand Anchor Arrow Feather Lotus Diamond Chevron Triangle Chain Geometric pattern Metallic

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gold came aboard at Tilbury in a cocoa tin, wrapped in greaseproof paper and a grey wool sock, and the chief steward swore it was for the captain's birthday cake. It was not. I knew because I was the one scrubbing the galley range every morning for six weeks, and nobody bakes with a tin rattling in the back of the larder like a loose bell.

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Stella Ferrier, the pastry cook, had a fat folder of transfer sheets she'd bought off a stall in Gravesend, thin as onion skin and printed with anchors, arrows and chevrons that marched like a rope of teeth. She laid them on the backs of her hands between dough rounds, pressed a damp cloth over the paper, and peeled it away slowly, leaving foil as bright as a dropped coin. The first time she did my forearm I told her to stop before the bosun saw. The second time I let her finish the arrows.

By the Bay of Biscay half the watch wore something that glinted. Ruddy Tomas had a lotus fanned across his shoulder blade that he touched whenever the swell rolled the galley over. Stella ran a chain of diamonds down the nape of her neck and told the purser it was a rosary, and nobody argued with a pastry cook holding a rolling pin. The foil dulled with every scrub, a little at a time, and I kept catching its flash in the steam off the stockpot.

We put in at Cape Town on a Tuesday. The anchor on my wrist had gone a dull pewter, the arrows were worn to ghosts, and when I rinsed my hands at the sink the last diamond slid off on the cold tap and down the drain, bright to the very end. I fished the scrap of backing from the strainer and pressed it flat to the inside of the spice rack lid, where it still sits among the nutmeg and cloves, a small gold sign that the sea once glittered on someone's skin for a while.