Sheet of metallic gold and silver henna-style tattoo designs showing lace bands, an elephant and a mandala flower.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Metallic henna-style temporary tattoo flash sheet

Colour · Flash

The sheet shows several horizontal lace-like bands, an ornate elephant with patterned body and trunk, and a circular mandala flower. The linework is fine and detailed, built from scrolls, dots and repeating motifs, with areas of solid fill in the larger pieces. The designs are rendered in metallic gold and silver tones on a white background, with a green-gold tint at the lower right.

Elephant Mandala Flower Dotted line Scrollwork

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 sheet came out of the salt crate the week the rain stopped, wrapped in oilcloth that smelled of somebody else's kitchen. My aunt Ruth had carried it three hundred miles on the back of a camel that did not like her, and she unrolled it on the workshop bench like a map. Bands of lace in gold and silver, a mandala the size of a saucer, and an elephant with its trunk curled over its back as if it were listening for weather.

Keep reading

Nobody left in Haldane Cross remembered elephants, but the old people said they once walked the coast roads in long grey lines, painted in henna for weddings. We had no henna. We had foil, a press that still worked if you coaxed it, and a bottle of rubbing spirit to lift the backing. The transfers lasted a day, two at most, which suited us. Everything we made was meant to be rubbed out by weather.

The night before the crossing, Ilse's boy stood in the doorway with his arm held out like a bridge. He wanted the elephant. I told him it would be gone by breakfast, and he said that was the point, that he would sleep with it and wake up and it would have been a thing that happened. So I pressed it on, dampened the backing, and counted to thirty under my breath while the gold dulled and settled into the lines. The scrollwork I did slowly, dot by dot, because the old women said the dots were what kept you from getting lost.

In the morning the elephant had gone soft at the ears and the trunk had split, but the lace band still ran across his wrist in a thin bright line. We walked out past the dead orchards with the sun on our backs. Ruth's sheet is still in the crate with the mandala left on it. I keep the elephant's backing folded in my coat, where it crackles when I walk, and every few miles I touch it to make sure it is still there.