rituals to purify them, and generally setting up. In that regard, the watch was simple: it used only seven pigments. Some of the magical tattoos I’ve done have used upwards of fifty.
So… pigments are simple, if a bit repetitive. The hardest part? Preparing the needles. Normal tattoos are done with little needles soldered to the end of a bar that goes into the tattooing machine. Magical tattoos require something a bit… different. Something that will soak up magic and release it on cue, not poison it like iron does. There are crystals that will work and even some new plastic composites from Japan, but the best material is unicorn horn— preferably free-shed, gathered, if not by virgins, by someone wearing blessed rubber gloves. Yes, Virginia, unicorns do exist. But that’s a story for another day.
Making the horn into needles takes many of the same tools that a modelmaker needs—magnifying glass and tweezers, files and sandpaper—and I did my needlework myself, which accounted for at least half of the quality of my work. It had taken two and a half hours to chip all the fragments I needed and file them into all the filigreed ‘points’ needed to ink the design—a one point, a triangular three, a curved five, and even a comblike seven for some of the larger outlines. You can’t solder the finished points: you have to glue them into a throwaway prong and clamp them. I tried reusable clamps once and it was a total wash—running them through the autoclave loosened the clamp, so the horn came loose in the client’s skin and he nearly ended up with a magical infection. Trust me—you don’t want one of those.
With the needles in the autoclave, the next step is the flash— printed on transfer paper so it can be copied to the skin. With an ordinary tattoo, a stencil and eyeballing it are enough, but for a magical design, you have to be more careful; Jinx had given me a list of resonant points, and once I began working on Alex’s skin I’d be pulling out a ruler and calipers to make sure the design was right. It can be tricky work—skin does shift and stretch, after all—and it would be a bit trickier since the design was reversed.
But now I had my ink and my needles and my flash and my subjects. All was in readiness—all that remained was to make sure that everyone understood this was my stage and my chair, and that inking a magic tattoo was not a stunt.
“I still don’t see why we had to come to you” Alex said, fidgeting in my tattooing chair. “Why couldn’t you have brought your equipment to the hospital?”
“First, I need a sterile environment,” I said, wiping down his hand. He jumped a little when I did it: I’ve had a lot of men in this chair and I know the signs when they’re stalling for time. “You understand sterile, right? Hospitals are dirty. That’s how the old man got a staph infection—”
“Luck of the draw. All hospitals,” Valentine said from his wheelchair, “put patients at risk for staph infections. They’re filled with diseased people in a confined space constantly being exposed to each other’s air, blood and fluids. Emory is one of the finest. Cleaner than most.”
“See?” Alex said, still squirming a little. “We could have made arrangements—”
“If James Randi can go on national television on a gurney when he was on morphine,” Valentine said, nostrils flaring, “I can survive a few hours in a wheelchair on Tylenol-3.”
“So, first, a few ground rules,” I said to the lead cameraman. “Hey you, behind the lens.”
“I’m the director,” a second man said imperiously, stepping forward.
“No, I’m the director in here,” I snapped, holding my eyes on him. “I’m putting a permanent magical mark on a human body, which I take very seriously whether you get it or not. I’ll try to make it easy on you to get a good shot, but when I’m working, the camera works around me and not the other way around. If I say slide, you slide. Savvy?”
He held up his hands. “We got it.”
“Same goes for you, old man,” I said to Valentine. “This isn’t a stage magic trick you get to expose. You pull some James Randi shit and leap up to start sprinkling Styrofoam chips on me when I’m working, I tattoo you a new working asshole in the middle of your forehead.”
Valentine blinked, then his brow furrowed. “Sure, but we’ll have