Two temporary tattoos on a child's wrists

Forearm · Colour · Photo

Two child's arms are held up with fists clenched, each wrist carrying a temporary tattoo. The left design is red with a circle, small dark marks and printed lettering, and the right is navy blue with stacked bars and a large ring. The bold flat colour and simple outlines sit against a grey speckled concrete background.

Forearm Temporary tattoo Circle Stripe Child Wrist Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ottilie Pask had stamped hands at the Dunmore pier fair for nineteen summers, and she had learnt that a mark was only a promise until the ink set. Her two rubber seals lived in a biscuit tin under the counter: a red ring printed with the words PLEASE DO NOT RE-ENTER, and a navy one of stacked bars she had cut herself with a craft knife and a great deal of swearing. Before the gates opened she tested both on the back of an old ticket stub, the way other people checked the weather.

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The twins from the caravan at the end of the harbour wall came at half six, pushing a pram full of sand. They wanted a stamp on each wrist, because they had decided over a breakfast of cold chips that the red one meant go and the blue one meant come back. Ottilie told them the seals did not work like that. The elder one said seals worked however people decided they did, and held out her arms.

Ottilie pressed the red ring to the first wrist and the navy bars to the second, counting to five under her breath as her father had taught her for registered post. The ink was still tacky when the gulls started up over the harbour and the big wheel shuddered into life. The children ran. Behind them the pier stayed quiet until the rain came in off the water and blurred the stamps into grey smudges that nobody would ever have called a design.

That evening Ottilie found a note wedged in the biscuit tin, written in careful capitals: WE CAME BACK. She laughed, folded it in with the seals, and pressed the red ring against the back of her own hand to see whether it would hold. It did not quite, but it left a faint ghost of itself, and she decided that would have to do.