Letter to My Daughter: A Novel - By George Bishop Page 0,46
and a poster of a smiling Buddha. The back of the room was cluttered with junk—a hot plate, an army trunk, some clothes, a standing lamp. Books lay everywhere. On a plywood shelf sat a Panasonic stereo playing a record of jangly folk rock.
“What’s your name?”
“Laura.”
“I’m Greg. You’re eighteen, right?”
“Yes.”
He hung up a hand towel and came and turned down the music. “So. How do you want it?”
He explained the colors he had. He showed me an album with tattoo designs on paper, some with lettering. He grabbed a pen and paper and practiced writing out the lines I’d told him. “Something like that?” He had surprisingly good penmanship. “Kind of like, what, Victorian? Edwardian?”
“That’s good.”
“Hm? Like that? You sure? Okay. Good enough. Where would you like to have this?”
I don’t believe I’d ever seen a tattoo on a woman before, and certainly not in the place I had in mind. But like I said, it wasn’t a matter of deciding. I knew where it had to go. I ran a finger down below my hip—a spot to mark the night in the parlor when Tim and I had promised ourselves to one another.
“You’ll have to, ah, lie back there.”
“Take them off?”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’d be better. You might take off your coat, too.”
I handed him my coat, and as he hung it up I pulled my blue jeans off and lay back on the cot.
“Little cold in here,” he said. “You want a blanket or something?”
“I’m fine.”
He turned to a counter to ready his things. I watched from the cot as he drew a long needle from a cloth pouch, looked at it, and chose a different one. He dropped the needle into a steel tray and poured rubbing alcohol over it. Then he turned his attention to the tattoo machine. It was a small, complicated, ugly brass device; it looked like something yanked from a car engine. He hooked the thing up to a black cord that ran to an electric power box on the counter and tested it. It made a harsh buzzing sound, like a dentist’s drill. I turned my eyes up to the ceiling, where there was a black-light poster of the stars of the zodiac arrayed around a golden sun against deep blue space. There was Sagittarius, and Scorpio, and Libra …
I jerked when something cold touched my skin. “Just gonna clean it with some alcohol,” he said. “I’ll trace it first with pen and then let you have a look.”
He settled himself on a stool by the cot. I could hear his breath sighing in and out of his nose as he drew the words on my skin. “Don’t get many girls your age in here,” he said. “Don’t get many girls at all, actually.” He rubbed at my skin with the cotton ball to correct something, and then resumed drawing with the pen. After a minute he sat back. “See what you think.” I pushed myself up on my elbows. “I brought the line around down underneath to give it a kind of flourish…. I can take that off if you want.”
“No. Leave it.” I thought it was lovely. Graceful and elegant, like something from a distant, romantic era. I watched as he spread a thin sheen of petroleum jelly over the words. Then he turned back to the counter and squeezed a small amount of red pigment into a tiny tin cup. Last, he removed the needle from the alcohol and fitted it into the machine. I lay back and looked up at the stars.
“You comfortable?” he asked.
“Mm-hm.”
He leaned over my hip and brought the tool close to my skin. He buzzed it once or twice and I braced myself for the sting. But then he abruptly stopped and sat back up.
“Look, ah, Laura. You sure about this? It’s just, you know, you’re not my typical customer.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose.
“It’s permanent?”
“Permanent.”
“Won’t ever come off?”
“Not likely.”
“Okay then,” I said.
“Okay then.” He nodded, and I closed my eyes as he lowered the machine and drove the needle home.
“Did it hurt?” you once asked me, Elizabeth.
“Not much,” I said.
What I meant, though, and what would’ve been impossible to explain then, was that it hardly hurt enough. I wanted the hurt. I welcomed the hurt. As the needle scored my skin, I understood for the first time why Saint Catherine of Siena had passed over the crown of gold and seized the one of thorns. There could hardly be pain enough