Ink Exchange

Chapter 4

The tattoo shop was empty when Leslie walked in. No voice broke the stillness of the room. Even the stereo was silenced.

"It's me," she called.

She went back to the room where Rabbit would do the work. The paper with the stencil of her tattoo waited on a tray on the counter beside a disposable razor and miscellaneous other items. "I'm a little early."

Rabbit stared at her for a moment but didn't say anything.

"You said we could start tonight. Do the outline." She came over to stare down at the stencil. She didn't touch it, though, strangely afraid that it would vanish if she did.

Finally Rabbit said, "Let me get the door."

While he was gone, she wandered around the tiny room—more to keep from touching the stencil than anything else. The walls were covered in various show and convention flyers—most faded and for events long past. A few framed photos, all black-and-white, and theater-size film posters were intermingled with the flyers. Like every other part of the shop, the room was impossibly clean and had a slight antiseptic scent.

She paused at several of the photos, not recognizing most of the people or places. Interspersed among them were framed pen-and-ink sketches. In one, Capone-era thugs were smiling at the artist. It was as realistic as any photograph, skillful to the degree that it seemed bizarre to see it hanging amidst the snapshots and posters. Rabbit returned as she was tracing the form of a stunningly beautiful man sitting in the middle of the group of gangsters. They were all striking, but it was him, the one leaning on an old twisted tree, who looked almost familiar. The others clustered around, beside, or behind him, but he was obviously the one with power. She asked, "Who's this?"

"Relatives," was all Rabbit said.

Leslie's attention lingered on the picture. The man in the image wore a dark suit like the other men, but his posture—arrogant and assessing—gave him the impression of being more menacing than the men around him. Here was someone to fear.

Rabbit cleared his throat and pointed in front of him. "Come on. Can't start with you over there."

Leslie forced herself to look away from the image. Fearing—or lusting on—someone who was either old or long dead was sort of weird anyhow. She went to where Rabbit had pointed, put her back to him, and pulled her shirt off.

Rabbit tucked a cloth of some sort under her bra strap. "To keep it clean."

"If ink or whatever gets on it, it's not a big deal." She folded her arms across her chest and tried to stand still. Despite how much she wanted the ink, standing there in her bra felt uncomfortable.

"You're sure?"

"Definitely. No buyer's remorse. Really, it's starting to border on obsession. I actually dreamed about it. The eyes in it and those wings." She blushed, thankful Rabbit was behind her and couldn't see her face.

He wiped her skin with something cold. "Makes sense."

"Sure it does." Leslie smiled, though: Rabbit wasn't fazed by anything, acting as if the oddest things were okay. It made her relax a little.

"Stay still." He shaved the fine hairs on the skin where the tattoo would go and wiped her off again with more cold liquid.

She glanced back as he walked away. He tossed the razor into a bin, pausing to give her a serious look before coming behind her again. She watched him over her shoulder.

He picked up the stencil. "Face that way."

"Where's Ani?" Leslie'd rarely been at the shop when Ani didn't show up, usually with Tish in tow. It was like she had some radar, able to track people down without any obvious explanation how.

"Ani needed quiet." He put a hand on her hip and moved her. Then he spritzed something lightly on her back where the ink would go—at the top of her spine between her shoulders, spanning the width of her back, centered over the spot where Leslie thought the wings would attach if they were real. She closed her eyes as he pressed the stencil onto her back. Somehow even that felt exciting.

Then he peeled away the paper. "See if it's where you want it."

She went to the mirror as quickly as she could without running. Using the hand mirror to see her reflection in the wall mirror, she saw it—her ink, her perfect ink stenciled on her skin—and grinned so widely, her cheeks hurt. "Yes. Gods, yes."

"Sit." He pointed at the chair.

She sat on the edge and watched as Rabbit methodically put on gloves, opened a sterile stick, and used it to pull a glop of clear ointment out of a jar and put it on a cloth-covered tray. He pulled out several tiny ink caps and tacked them down to the drop cloth. Then he poured ink into them.

I've watched this plenty of times; it's not a big deal. She couldn't look away, though.

Rabbit did each step silently, as if she weren't there. He opened the needle package and pulled out a length of thin metal. It looked like it was just one needle, but she knew from her hours listening to Rabbit talk shop that there were several individual needles at the tip of a needle bar. My needles, for my ink, in my skin. Rabbit slid the needle bar into the machine. The soft sound of metal sliding across metal was followed by an almost inaudible snick. Leslie let out breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. If she thought Rabbit would let her, she'd ask to hold the tattoo machine, ask to wrap her hand around the primitive-looking coils and angled bits of metal. Instead she watched Rabbit make adjustments to it. She shivered. It looked like a crude handheld sewing machine, and with it he'd stitch beauty onto her body. There was something primal about the process that resonated for her, some sense that after this she'd be irrevocably different, and that was exactly what she needed.

"Turn that way." Rabbit motioned, and she moved so her back was to him. He smeared ointment over her skin with a latex-clad finger. "Ready?"

"Mm-hmm." She braced herself, wondering briefly if it would hurt but not caring. Some of the people she'd seen complained like the pain was unbearable. Others seemed not to notice it at all. It'll be fine. The first touch of needles was startling, a sharp sensation that felt more like irritation than pain. It was far from awful.

"You good?" He paused, taking away the touch of needles as he spoke.

"Mm-hmm," she said again: it was the most articulate answer she could offer in the moment. Then, after a pause that was almost long enough to make her beg him to get back to it, he lowered the tattoo machine to her skin again. Neither spoke as he outlined the tattoo. Leslie closed her eyes and concentrated on the machine as it hummed and paused, lifting from her skin only to touch back down. She couldn't see it, but she'd watched Rabbit work often enough to know that in some of those pauses Rabbit dipped the tip of the needle into the tiny ink caps like a scholar inking his quill.

And she sat there, her back stretched in front of him as if she were a breathing piece of canvas. It was wonderful. The only sound was the hum of the machine. It was more than a sound, though: it was a vibration that seemed to slip through her skin and sink into the marrow of her bones.

"I could stay like this forever," she whispered, eyes still closed.

A dark laugh rolled out of somewhere. Leslie’s eyessnapped open. "Is someone here?"

"You're tired. School and extra shifts this month, right? Maybe you drifted off." He tilted his head in that peculiar way he and his sisters had, like a dog hearing a new sound.

"Are you saying I fell asleep sitting up while you were tattooing me?" She looked back at him and frowned.

"Maybe." He shrugged and turned away to open a brown glass bottle. It was unlike the other ink bottles: the label was handwritten in a language she didn't recognize.

When he uncapped it, it seemed as if tiny shadows slithered out of it. Weird. She blinked and stared at it. "I must be tired," she muttered.

He poured ink from the bottle into another ink cap— holding it aloft so the outside of the bottle didn't touch the side of the ink cap—then sealed the bottle and changed gloves.

She repositioned herself and closed her eyes again. "I expected it to hurt, you know?"

"It does hurt." Then he lowered the tattoo machine to her skin again, and she stopped remembering how to speak.

The hum had always sounded comforting when Leslie had listened to Rabbit working, but feeling the vibration on her skin made it seem exciting and not at all comforting. It felt different from what she'd imagined, but it wasn't what she'd call pain. Still, she doubted it was something she could've slept through.

"You okay?" Rabbit wiped her skin again.

"I'm good." She felt languid, like her bones weren't all the way solid anymore. "More ink."

"Not tonight."

"We could just finish it tonight—"

"No. This one will take a couple sessions." Rabbit was quiet as he wiped her skin. He slid his chair back; the wheels sounded loud as they slid over the floor, like a boulder being pushed across a metal grate.

Weird.

She stretched—and almost blacked out.

Rabbit steadied her. "Give it a sec."

"Head rush or something." She blinked to clear her vision, resisting the urge to try to focus on the shadows that seemed to be walking through the room unattached to anything.

But Rabbit was there, showing her the tattoo—my tattoo—with a pair of hand mirrors. She tried to speak, and might have. She wasn't sure. Time felt like it was off, speeding and slowing, keeping pace with some faraway chaos clock, bending to rhythms that weren't predictable. Rabbit was covering her new tattoo with a sterile bandage. At the same time, it seemed, his arm was around her, helping her stand.

She stepped unsteadily forward. "Careful with my wings."

She stumbled. Wings?

Rabbit said nothing; perhaps he hadn't heard or understood. Perhaps she hadn't spoken—but she could picture them—dark, shadowy swoops, somewhere between feathers and slick-soft aged leather, that tickled the sensitive skin at the backs of her knees.

As soft as I remembered.

"Rabbit? I feel weird. Wrong. Something wrong."

"Endorphin rush, Leslie, making you feel high. It'll be okay. It's not unusual." He didn't look at her when he spoke, and she knew he was lying.

She felt like she should be afraid, but she wasn't. Rabbit had lied: something was very wrong. She knew with a certainty that seemed impossible—like tasting sugar and having it called salt—that the words he said didn't taste true.

But then it didn't matter. The missing hands of the chaos clock shifted again, and nothing else mattered in that moment, just the ink in her skin, the hum in her veins, the euphoric zinging that made her feel a confidence she'd not known in far too long.