Close view of two forearms with metallic temporary tattoos in gold, silver and blue, including palm trees, a wave, leaves and shells, against sand.

Metallic palm tree and wave designs on forearms

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two forearms are raised towards the head, with the face and chin cropped out of frame. The designs are metallic temporary tattoos: a silver palm tree and a black palm tree on the forearms, a blue wave, and bands of leaves, scallop shells and beaded lines on the wrists and arms. The foil shows gold, silver, blue and black against warm skin dusted with sand, with bright daylight behind.

Botanical Forearm Palm tree Wave Leaf Shell Bangle Metallic Sand Beach

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind kept lifting the foil off the card, so Mrs Pascoe pegged her transfers to the stall like washing. Silver palms, black palms, a blue wave with a curl like a cat's tail, cockle shells strung on threads of beads. She had copied the palms from a postcard of a place she had never seen, and nobody on the harbour at Porthlenna knew a palm from a bramble, but they bought them anyway, for the summer and the shine of it.

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Nell Hocking bought a silver palm and the wave on a Tuesday in August, paying in halfpennies she had been saving in a jar. She carried them home face down on her palm like moths, then pressed them on with a damp flannel the way Mrs Pascoe had shown her, rubbing until the backing lifted away and the foil stayed. Sand got under the edges by teatime. Her mother said it would wash off by Sunday, and it did, mostly, but the shine held in the creases of the metal for a week after, like a tide mark left on the sand.

On the Thursday the glass fell fast and the boats came in early, all but the Morwenna, which her father had taken out past the point. Nell stood on the wall with the lighthouse beam sweeping over the water, and each time it swung round, the silver palm caught the light and threw it back out to sea. Her father said later he saw a flash low on the water and steered for it, the way you steer for a lamp in a window.

Mrs Pascoe sold the last tin the following spring to a boy who wanted the wave for his bicycle. She counted the coins twice, found a fleck of storm sand in the bottom of the tin, and left it there.