Indelible

“Nah, she ain’t in today. Never is on Valentines. Can’t stand all the hearts and the lovey dovey stuff.

Debbie loves Damon.

Stacey forever.

All that shit.

Yeah, I know it’s her you wanted. Best tattoo artist in the place. Hell, best one in the whole city, even with her little impediment. Ain’t happening though. Big Mike’ll fit you in. Or Kirstin, if you can come back this afternoon. Sure, go off, have a nice meal first. Just don’t get drunk – company policy. No permanently marking the inebriated."

The door jangles as they go out, arms around each other like they’re afraid if they let go the other one’ll vanish. I watch ‘em cross the street, worried they won’t make it cos they’re too busy looking at each other instead of the traffic. Young love. Damn menace. I’m with Carla on that.

Course, it’s a bit different for her. A bit darker.

She’s been here, working the inks, since she left college. Coulda been a real artist, talent she had. I’d never say that to her face, though, she gives me hell every time I try.

“I am a real artist, Wes! Gotta be a thousand people walking around this city with my work on their skin. Art don’t get more real than that.”

She’s right, in a way. More commitment in a tattoo than a painting. Can’t just take it down when you’re sick of looking at it. Nobody knows that better than her.

I don’t know why she did it in the first place. You’d think she’d have had more sense, by then. Already been here years, gone through her share of men, women too. Never was dumb enough to put their names on her skin until he came along.

I never liked him. Them eyes. Something not right in ‘em. Went straight through me. She fell hard, though. He got his fangs in deep. Right the way down to the bone.

He didn’t start off mean, possessive. I guess they never do. In the beginning he was all sweetness and light, bringing her lunch, flowers. Charming the rest of us with coffee and compliments. Sweet as antifreeze. Course, we don’t use that in the inks here, lord no. We’re above board. People trust us.

But him. Oh I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could spit.

Sure enough, a few months in, he turned nasty as a dirty needle. Checking up on her. Calling her names. Slapping her around, when he thought she’d been seeing someone else, which was damn near always. Heard voices in his head, he told her, telling him what she’d been up to. Who she’d been with.

Crazy, she said, you’re crazy, and she dumped him like a hot knife, but he wouldn’t be got rid of. Followed her round, all over the place. Turned up here, screaming, shouting, 'til Big Mike chased him off. One point, she was staying with a different one of us every night, on account of him coming round her apartment, threatening to break the door down.

That’s why she was at mine, the night it happened.

“Wes,” she says to me, right after dinner, “I don’t feel right. You put something in that chicken?”

I told her I felt just fine, but she looked sick. Started rubbing at the black patch on her arm where that tattoo of his name used to be, like she could rub it off.

“Stop that,” I told her, “you’ll give yourself an infection,” but she just kept rubbing away, ’til her phone rang and then she hadn’t got time to worry about it any more, cause it was him, fussing and carrying on and telling her he was going to do away with hisself if she didn’t take him back. Musta got a new phone or something, cause I know she had him blocked. I could hear him across the room, shouting at her.

“I’ve taken something,” he says, “Poison. You have to come save me.”

“Drake! Where are you? I’ll call an ambulance!”

“No, you gotta come. Only you.”

“Sure,” she says, “sure, I’m coming. Tell me where you are!”

I tried to stop her, told her you can’t go running every time someone threatens like that. He wants to kill hisself over her, that ain’t on her. That bunch of crazy’s all on him.

“I can’t leave him to die, can I?” She says. So I sigh and put on my shoes and I go with her.

We get to him in time. Sorta.

He’s still alive, anyways.

“What he take?” the paramedics ask, and all we can do is shrug. By this time he’s making no sense. His eyes are rolling and there’s blisters coming up all over his skin.

I forget what they said it was in the end. Whatever it was, he misjudged it.

Lasted out seven days.

By the end of it, he was covered in sores and welts, head to toe. Strangest thing, though, one place was fine. The little patch of skin with her name on it. She always said that made it worse. How, when they buried him, all she could think of was that patch of skin rotting away last, like he’d taken her with him somehow.

Course, she’d already got rid of his name by then. Covered it up with a black band the week they broke up. Didn’t do no good though. After he died, it was there, reminding her. A big, black blank, like a chunk carved out of her that she wasn’t never going to get back.

Then it started itching.

Doctors gave her creams, pills, did lab tests; in the end they told her it was all in her mind. That made sense. Every time she looked at it, she said, she’d think of him and her flesh’d crawl. They offered to remove it but it cost more than she could afford. We see enough scars here to know that don’t always work so great anyhow.

“No worries,” she says. “I know just what to do.”

Turned it into a snake. Beautiful, sinuous line to it, like you’d expect of her. “Snakes mean transformation,” she told me when she did it, “shedding skin. Like I’m gonna shed him, at last.”

Came out stunning. So real, you’d swear you could see it move. Ton of customers asked her to copy it for ‘em but she wouldn’t.

“You don’t want one like this, she said. It’s poison.” They thought she was joking but I could tell better.  It hadn’t worked. He was still in her blood, like his name had leaked through her cells, like a stain, spreading. Like a disease.

It was Valentines Day about five years ago. I came in early, found her out the back in the kitchen. Floor slicked with blood and the big electric bread knife Kirstin used to use for the sandwiches clutched in her hand.

The only hand she still had.

Her other one was lying there, like a lump of something from a butcher’s shop, except for that damned tattoo.

I sat her up, wrapped her in a towel to stop the bleeding while I called 911. They got here pretty quick, thank the lord. Strangest thing was, she didn’t seem to feel no pain.

“Free, now!” she kept laughing. “I’m free!”

“It’s the loss of blood,” they told me. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

I think she did, though.