A product sheet of metallic gold, silver and black temporary tattoo designs, showing geometric chain, diamond and zigzag bands, with no body part visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Metallic temporary tattoo sheet with geometric bands

Geometric · Mixed · Flash

A white card sheet with a printed Portuguese heading carries several vertical bands of temporary tattoo designs. The bands show chain links, square and diamond motifs, arcs, and zigzag lines with dots, drawn in flat gold, silver and black. The designs are arranged in tidy columns on a plain white background with no skin visible.

Geometric Chain Diamond Square Arc Zigzag Dot Border Metallic Temporary tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sheets arrived in a cardboard box that smelt of the ferry, and Senhora Abreu counted them twice before she would let me open the tape. Forty cards, each with the same white field and the same gold and silver bands running down like the lines of a ledger. She said the words across the top meant metal temporary tattoo, and that the Lisbon man who made them had never once seen the sea.

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I sold them from the kiosk by the fish market all summer. Chains went to the boys who wanted something to show off at the football, and the diamonds and squares went to the grandmothers, who turned them over with their fingers and said they looked like the cloth on the altar at Santa Cruz. The zigzags with their little dots sold worst. Nobody wanted to be told which way the sea was running.

In September a woman came off the afternoon boat with a rucksack and no Portuguese beyond the price. She bought the whole gold run of arcs and asked me, slowly, whether the pattern carried on if you laid the columns side by side. I showed her. The arcs met at the seams like cupped hands, and the diamonds lined up into a path you could follow out of the harbour and up the hill.

She never came back for more, but last week a card arrived in the post with no return address, only a photograph of a pale stone wall with a silver chain of squares climbing it, lifting a little at one corner. I pinned it above the till beside the tide tables. Each morning when I open the shutter the diamonds catch the light off the water, and I think of the path she followed, and how little of it needed to be real to walk.