Overhead view of many small temporary tattoo designs, including animals, flowers, lettering and simple line motifs, scattered around a silver tin marked SUPER.

Temporary tattoo designs around a metal tin

Lettering · Mixed · Flash

Many small temporary tattoo designs are laid out on a white surface around a silver metal tin engraved with the word SUPER. The designs include a bear in a waistcoat, a dinosaur, an anchor, a key, a whale, a fox, butterflies, roses and a tortoise, with lettering such as LOVE and OKAY LET'S DO THIS. Most use black linework or simple shading, while the watercolour florals, butterflies and rainbow bands add colour.

Lettering Botanical Anchor Dinosaur Key Whale Fox Butterfly Rose Bear Heart Feather Unicorn Diamond Paper plane Ice cream Rainbow Skull Elephant Lettering

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 tin had been rattling inside the box marked KITCHEN MISC for three weeks before Ines finally prised the lid off on the bare floor of the new flat. Stacked boxes leaned around her like a wall of biscuit crumbs. Inside, folded in squares of pale paper, sat a jumble of little dreams: a fox sitting upright in a hedge, a whale breaching, a key with a fussy bow, a tortoise carrying its own house on its back.

Keep reading

Her mother had bought the pack for Ines's ninth birthday, the year Ines refused to leave the house without a trick up her sleeve. Nobody had warned her that the tattoos would outlast the school, the friendship and the bus route that once carried them both. Ines sorted them into piles by animal, then by how many were still stuck to their backing, then by which ones she was too grown up to want. The piles kept refusing to stay tidy, the way things do when you are trying to be sensible about the past.

She found the paper plane last, tucked under the lid's rim where the tin had been pressed shut for years. It was faded but whole, two crisp wings and a single fold of nose. She sat cross-legged on the lino and peeled the backing, then pressed the plane onto the silver lid, right over the scratched word SUPER. She held a damp flannel against it and counted to thirty, the way the packet said.

When she lifted the flannel the plane was still there, a little blurred at one wing, pointing straight out of the window over the car park. Ines left the tin open on the sill overnight, so the morning could find it first.