Many Sudanese women in Cairo, Aswan, and other governorates rely primarily on their henna art skills to earn a living in Egypt. Through these labor and art practices, women are also able to navigate borders, states, and cities given that work with henna can allow for some degree of mobility. The reliance on henna as labor in Cairo is a tiresome, yet necessary, means of income for the women who have to commute to the required spaces (primarily tourist attractions like Khan-El-Khalili), spend hours on end looking for customers, and navigate a police state where they are regularly arrested and imprisoned under charges of tasawul, or “mendacity.” In addition, racism often factors into the how Egyptian authorities target these women. This project is based on a photo essay (in 2017-2018) in which I did fieldwork with Sudanese refugee/migrant women living in Cairo. I aim to highlight how these women navigate through states and borders while at one and the same time laboring for their livelihoods, primarily by focusing on their henna artwork/labor practices and how the henna moves with them. In other words, their dependence on making henna art as work is one that structures of structural violence and racism impose, but the henna art itself is a manifestation of an art form, and hence a means of expression for many women. Sudanese women often have a long history with henna as they reform and grow the henna in design and practice with time, and they learn and teach it to fellow women. My interlocutors engage with each other’s henna work, critique it, and admire it. I add layers to this project by contextualizing the IMF/ World Bank economic structural reforms, Sudanese-Egyptian border/diplomatic relations, and racialization in Egypt. Through this project, I aim to unfold the ways in which working, black, Sudanese women in Cairo are criminalized, racialized, and sexualized. I study their labor in terms of the products, the art forms, and the commodities that they shape and produce. Furthermore, I look into how their labor is passed on to, and between, the people who receive and consume it. I pose the questions: What does it mean to practice this in a moment of intense political and economic violence (of post-revolutionary Egypt and pre-revolutionary Sudan)? How can one read the operation of power, resistance, refusal, disenchantment and struggle, within, and around the labor and movement of these women?