By adjusting the process parameters of the ultraviolet microsecond laser, stable colors including black, blue, purple, purple-red, orange, and light yellow are induced on the surface of 304 stainless steel. Coloring mechanism of 304 stainless steel induced by the microsecond laser is discussed and believed to be the color of the oxide layer and the film interference effect. The HSB values of the color patches are predicted by using the Elman neural network for the given laser parameters. The predicted results show that the average relative errors of hue, saturation, and brightness are 4.04%, 13.33% and 4.05%, respectively. The colors of the processed pattern have a good consistency with the predicted colors.