A New Zealand artist is hoping to give sick kids a confidence boost by offering temporary airbrushed tattoos to children at an Auckland hospital.

Benjamin Lloyd asked for 50 likes on Facebook when he floated the idea to visit children at Starship Hospital and offer them temporary sleeves on Sunday night.

Instead, he got more than 416,000.

“I woke up and it had just gone viral. Now it has popped up on about 20 million people’s pages,” he said.

Mr Lloyd has been airbrushing “everything on anything” for 10 years, mostly working with adults who are unsure whether to get permanent tattoos.

But when his stepson one day asked for a temporary tat, he found the reaction intriguing.

“When I was doing children, the reaction was just amazing,” he said.

“After they had it they would walk around, chins up, so confident and so proud.

“You can’t help but just love that, so I just thought I want to go where there’s heaps of kids and do that.”

Starship Hospital has since been in contact with Mr Lloyd and has organised a meeting tomorrow to put a plan in motion.

Mr Lloyd said he was in the process of creating a range of different stencils for the kids to choose from.

“They’ve got nothing to do, they’re stuck in their room all day and I would just love to go and put a smile on their faces,” he said.