The ancient practice of applying henna (mehndi) to the hands and feet as a temporary body art — deeply rooted in wedding and festival traditions across South Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East — achieved global popularity in the 1990s and early 2000s, driven partly by the diaspora communities who brought it to Western cities and partly by a mainstream fashion adoption that sometimes stripped it of its cultural context. Mehndi's elaborate floral, geometric, and figurative patterns have been used for centuries to mark life transitions — particularly the bride's preparation for marriage — as a form of auspicious bodily inscription. The global spread of mehndi raised familiar debates about cultural appropriation and the commodification of ritual body art.

Mehndi and henna body art are woven throughout the South Asian literary tradition from classical Urdu and Hindi ghazals — where the bride's henna-painted hands are a central lyric image — to contemporary diaspora poetry in English. Poets including Sujata Bhatt, Moniza Alvi, and Imtiaz Dharker have engaged with mehndi as a figure for the negotiation of cultural identity in diaspora, the transmission of embodied female knowledge across generations, and the temporary nature of all bodily inscription. The temporary tattoo becomes, in these poems, a figure for identity that is performed, patterned, and ultimately dissolved.