Two side-by-side photos of gold, silver and black temporary tattoos on arms, including palm trees, arrows and an Eye of Horus design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Metallic temporary tattoos on arms and forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Left, a woman lies on sand with her arms raised, showing gold and silver palm tree, leaf and wave designs on her forearm and upper arm. Right, arrows, feathers, a banded pattern and an Eye of Horus sit on a forearm and wrist beside a shell necklace. The designs are outlined and solid metallic ink with fine detail, set against warm, sunlit skin.

Botanical Geometric Forearm Upper arm Palm tree Leaf Wave Arrow Feather Eye of horus Shell Band Sand Necklace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wedding was set for the night the tide turned, because that was when Halda's mother had been married, and her mother before that. The groom's family came along the dunes with a string of cowrie shells and a box of foil, and nobody asked where the foil had come from. Old Ysolde, who kept the bay's oldest pots, took the box and went down to the lee of the rocks to work.

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She painted the arms first. A palm for the bride's mother, who had crossed the water from the south with nothing but a comb. A leaf for the groom's brother, who had mended every net in the village and never once been thanked. Waves ran up the inside of each wrist where the pulse is, because the sea had given them their living and might take it back. Each mark she pressed on with a warm knife and a little brine, and each one shone gold or silver in the last light.

Arrows went on the forearms for the hunters who had gone inland and not come back, with feathers beside them, so the dead would know which way home was. The eye she saved for the wrist of the youngest guest, a girl who asked too many questions and had been told by everyone to be quiet. Ysolde said the eye was for seeing clearly, and for not being fooled by a fine box of foil.

By morning the marks had faded to the colour of sand, as Ysolde had promised they would. Nobody had been fooled. The bride's mother stood at the water's edge with her palm glinting on her arm and said that a wedding should cost something, even if only a little shine. The tide came in over the footprints, and the shells rattled on their cord like a second set of vows.