Woman on a sandy beach with a silver metallic ornamental design running from the wrist up the forearm, placed on the forearm.

Silver metallic arm design on a beach

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with long blonde hair wears a patterned bikini top on a sandy beach. A silver-white ornamental design, which looks like a temporary metallic tattoo, runs from the wrist up the forearm, combining a small arrow motif with scrolling filigree and lace-like openwork. The sea and cloudy sky fill the background, and the design is the sharpest detail in the frame.

Forearm Arrow Scrollwork Ornament Metallic Beach Bikini

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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

You have been hired to sit in the cloakroom of the Pavilion Ballroom with a tin of silver paint and a box of fine brushes, because Mrs Pargeter says the girls want something to show under the lights. Every Saturday the band plays until the tide turns, and the dancers come in off the sand with bare wrists and leave with a lace of silver running up toward the elbow. You learned the stencil from your grandmother, who copied it from a shawl she never let anyone wash: a small arrow, a scroll, a loop like a fern unrolling.

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Tonight the pier shakes under the bass, and a deckhand named Tom Fennick, who is not yours to keep, asks for the arrow on the back of his hand. You warn him it will smudge on his cuffs. He says he would rather be marked by something than by nothing. So you paint it slowly, the brush hairs stiff with cold, while he counts the bars of the waltz under his breath and tries not to look at the door.

At midnight the doors bang open and salt comes in on the wind. The silver catches the lamps, and you watch the arrow point out past the railings toward the dark water, where the boat lights go out one by one. By morning it will have worn to nothing. You leave the tin on the sill with the lid loose anyway, in case somebody else needs pointing home.