KELLY LOOKED AT THE DARK BLACK SHADOWS swirling along the inside of his right forearm, repulsed by their symmetry. Wisps of gray shading traced the sharpest lines, adding dimension and depth and… despair. Two weeks since the last drops of the ink were driven under his skin and his tattoo was all but healed. But daily compliments from random strangers kept the needles’ sting from fading, and for that he was grateful in small measure.
He deserved that pain and would, he hoped, feel it every day for the rest of his life, welcoming the pyrotechnic shame that flared each time he caught a glimpse of it.
No singular insight can encompass the whole of a person, but sometimes a single trait comes close. Understanding Kelly, a guy who imagined himself a mystery to others, came down to one fact: he was completely shocked to discover India ink begins blue-black and not green.
At 37, he’d committed to his first tattoo, a simple plan. Right forearm, below the bend at his elbow. A skull, but not a cliched one. A sunflower bursting yellow in the left eye socket and a white crucifix in the shadow of the exposed nasal cavity. The cross a nod to his awareness that getting tattooed placed his soul in danger, the sunflower a case for his reasons’ righteousness. He imagined thin lines, delicate not diminutive, descriptions he used in his head, not with the artist.
Kelly did this often, deescalating his vocabulary when he thought the listener needed more approachable terms. It was a service he did others. His father said it made him a smug asshole, but they had not spoken in years. Kelly thought this might change at his mother’s funeral service four months earlier, but his father didn’t even make the trip down from Bakersfield. He told Kelly’s sister, Heidi, they’d already said their goodbyes in legal documents, so there was nothing more for him to say. Kelly decided this made him the asshole, smug or not.
Framing the skull would be the perfect words, scrawled in his own blocky printing and fractioned neatly three above and four below. “Resurrected in flowers, our bodies a field.” He’d written the lines himself, a tribute to Gina. She hated flowers and church and he loved both despite her feelings on either. He wouldn’t say he was past his sadness over her death, but he hoped the physical and metaphoric pain of the process would nudge him closer to it.
The concept burst inside him at her memorial, an intrusive thought he tried to swat away physically when it slithered into his head while Heidi sang Gina’s favorite song, “Jesus, I Have My Doubts.” Not usually a visual thinker, the image of the skull appeared to him photo-real, every detail sharp and darkly rendered, as close to an epiphany as he’d ever experienced.
The words came to him in a dream three nights later, whispered in his ear by a voice like closed-caption text on a screen. He woke bolt upright and wrote them down on a pad he kept next to the bed for charting his work nightmares, dreams that operated like more terrifying to-do lists than the ones on his desk at the bank branch he managed. For a moment, he stared at the two neat lines of script as if he’d somehow manifested something mystic. Then he read them aloud, confirming this was, indeed, a brush with divinity.
Over the next two months, he researched tattoo artists obsessively, starting a new social media account just to stalk them online. By the time he found Skylar, he was following more than 200 accounts and using terms like “blown out” and “scratchy” in casual conversation like he judged tattoo contests. Her work, however, reminded him of how little he knew. Lines and angles splayed out in ways that shouldn’t make any sense but felt like Polaroids of his past. Portraits like framed art. Flowers vase fresh. Partial images so precise even just their edges crawling from under sleeves and necklines made sense of whole pieces.
Something about her work gripped his arm, physically, and he messaged her minutes after stumbling onto her account. She wrote back that night and, after a brief back and forth, set up a consultation two weeks later. Typically, she was booked up to four months in advance, but a rare window had opened in her schedule and Kelly snatched it because the moment felt like fate and faith meeting in the middle. The next 13 days he vacillated between thrill and terror at the thought of seeing his vision etched onto his body. And then, suddenly, he was sitting across a small table from her describing what he wanted.
“So, you want this in black and gray, right? Just the flower in color?” Skylar asked.
“No, green, like most tattoos. Authentic.”
Skylar’s forehead pulled tight in confusion. She was almost distractingly stylish, like a photographer from Inked Magazine who could have been the model she was shooting. Piercings in the prescribed left nostril and middle of her lower lip. A black pixie cut with severe bangs in a perfectly straight line two thirds of the way up her forehead and a single blue streak plunging down her left temple. Sleeves of portraits and passages from The Beautiful and the Damned and 10:04 on both arms ending on the backs of her hands. Black Liz Phair t-shirt over black jeans and emerald green Doc Martens scuffed genuine with age and use on her Ducati sport bike parked out front of the shop. Her look was so perfect it made Kelly itchy when he looked her in the eye.
“Green? Like green ink or when they age in?”
“What do you mean age in?”
Kelly felt heat blossoming in the skin around his eyes as he asked it. He watched her chew her lip, her eyebrows almost touching in the middle at the deep furrow of her forehead. The silence stretched over several long moments as acid crept up his throat.
“So, wait, you do know India ink is really dark blue and green to kinda look black, right?” The way she said it made Kelly imagine her standing in front of classroom of first graders, a picture book open as she explained that once upon a time was necessary for happily ever after. “It turns green because white blood cells break down the darker parts of the ink. But that takes years.”
“Oh, uh, ok. Is there a way, I don’t know, you could distress it so it looks aged? Like craquelure or something along those lines? This is a memento mori and it won’t feel weighty enough if it looks new…”
“I mean, we have black ink now that basically stays black…”
The words in Kelly’s head grew increasingly complex and he sat mute, sifting through what they required him to say in response. While he did, Skylar sat patiently, her pencil hanging just above her sketch pad as if frozen in a posture designed to challenge his confidence. He leaned back in his chair to vent some of the pressure her gaze imposed on the air between them.
“Alright, just use the India ink so that eventually it will look like it has too.”
Skylar nodded and went to work without a word, the rasping scratch of her pencil the only sound for at least 10 minutes. At that point, she paused and looked up at Kelly.
“You can take a walk if you want. This is going to take me an hour or so to rough out and you don’t have to be sitting here while I do it.”
“What if you need to ask me a question, you know, about the design.” She smiled and the way she did it made him feel childish.
“I’ve got that covered. It’s kind of what I do. Take a break and let me pull this together.”
Kelly stood up and pulled up a folded piece of notepad paper from his pocket with the words he wanted written out in his handwriting. Skylar took the note, gave it a quick glance, and nodded before leaning back over her sketch. Feeling chastened, he walked away, fighting the urge to steal one last look at what she had drawn all the way out the door.
He walked back into the shop exactly one hour after walking out, a half-finished energy drink in his hand. He’d spent most of the time walking around the streets directly adjacent to the dumpy Long Beach strip mall that played home to the tattoo parlor, forgetting the open can he was carrying. He waited awkwardly until Skylar came out of a room at the back of the building carrying her sketchbook and nodded her head at the chair he'd been sitting in before.
“Ok, let’s take a look,” she said.
He could tell by the way Skylar flipped through the pages she was feeling good about her work. When she stopped on the page with his tattoo, he rocked back in his chair. It was—to the detail—exactly the image that had appeared to him, right down to a small horseshoe-shaped imperfection in the right cheek bone. It was so similar he felt like it was already on his body and his earlier itchiness returned.
“That’s…perfect. Like, get out of my head perfect.”
She laughed for the first time that evening and the unexpectedly low rumble of it made his chest expand.
“I’m glad you like it. And good news, my appointment later tonight cancelled. I can ink you up right now.”
“I, uh, well, I’m not sure. I came in thinking this was just getting it set up.”
“Look, it’s up to you and feel free to wait. But just know you will be waiting. After tonight, I don’t think I can fit you in for about three months.”
Kelly shook his head. He knew he’d talk himself out the whole thing if he put it off that long. But the thought of getting it right away felt like stepping off a ledge over moving traffic for some reason. Swallowing hard like he could digest the fear, he looked her in the eye and forced a smile he assumed looked more than a little manic.
“Alright, yeah, let’s do it.”
“Cool. While I set up, can you to go next door and pick up a disposable razor.”
“What for?”
“Pretty sure you haven’t shaved your forearm recently, right? Kinda tough to do good lines around your hair.”
“Oh, yeah, got it. I’ll be right back.”
“Take your time. I need to put this drawing on transfer paper too. I’ll have all the paperwork for you to sign when you get back, too.”
“Oh, ok. Guess I’ll take another walk.”
She nodded and he left again. When he came back, Skylar had her station set up. A flat extension jutted off the right side of the reclining chair for his arm and a wheeled tray like doctors use for surgical instruments was covered with small containers of ink, two different tattoo guns, and the press-on version of his tattoo. Kelly handed her the razor and sat down, his sleeve already rolled above the elbow. After running the documents under a pen for his signature, Skylar rubbed shaving cream on his forearm and then scraped the hair from it in long, clean strokes.
“So, one thing,” she said as she wiped the excess cream off his now gleamingly pale arm with a towel. “I really think you should go with black ink rather than India. This piece is stunning, if I do say so myself, and part of what makes it look so good is that dark, crisp black and yellow contrast. You’ll want that to stand up over time.”
Kelly shifted uncomfortably. “I just always pictured it green, you know? Not quite perfect. Lived in, like the body you’re putting it on.”
“Look, it’s your tattoo. Do what you want. I’m just telling you what’ll look best.”
“Yeah, I get that…just feels hard to let go of my vision.”
She nodded but held silent like earlier. If he was honest with her, which he would not be, it was his mother holding him up. She’d had exactly one tattoo on her body, the outline of a butterfly the size of a baseball trading card on her left calf. She got it before he was born and by the time he noticed it, the image was deep green and somehow made him feel hopeful about life.
They never talked about it, but Gina’s butterfly always gave Kelly the sense that life would never be harder than the transformation all people were capable of. The green tint of the ink encouraged him to imagine the actual colors of a butterfly, colors he believed his mother saw when she looked at it, though he had no basis for that assumption.
“Look, will you trust me? I think my drawing’s earned me that much.” Skylar’s voice drew him back into the chair and the unsettled present.
“I mean, it’s not so much about trust as being faithful to the vision I had. To the reason I’m getting this in the first place.”
“Sometimes our visions need other people to help put flesh on them…or put them on our flesh.”
Kelly nodded, her words’ logic tipping him to agreement despite himself.
“Alright, let’s do it.”
“Excellent! You won’t regret it.”
Kelly did regret it. Immediately. But the scorching embarrassment he felt as the first lines were etched into his skin kept him from saying anything. It was too late anyway. He spent the four hours it took Skylar to complete the piece staring into the middle distance at the various pictures on the wall. Skylar was evidently a talented artist in a number of ways. An oil painting of Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood washed in twilight hung next to a stark photographic self-portrait of her in all black holding a white orchid next to a diploma from Cal State Long Beach noting a double major in studio art and literature.
Each new piece fascinated Kelly, like discovering elements of living that helped make her the artist she was. But none of it could distract from the scrape and scratch of needles pressing unwanted black ink into his arm or that he had asked for the pain they were causing in the first place. After an hour, he simply closed his eyes and sat with shame that made every inch of his skin feel like it was being stung by bees. He refused to look at the tattoo until it was complete and didn’t really want to see it even then.
But he remained silent. What he wanted was as irrelevant as the fact that he had not wanted a tattoo for the entirety of his life leading up to that moment. There was only one certainty in the pain: Skylar’s version of his vision was what must be. Reconciling what it meant to give himself over to a process so fully outside his control was work for later, if reconciliation was possible at all.
“How are ya doin’ in there?” Skylar’s voice seemed to drift into his head from farther away than the chair next to him and Kelly wondered how long he’d been lost inside himself.
“I’m good.”
“You’re sittin’ like a champ. Not much left to do here. Final touches. A little contrast work on the cross. Maybe 10 more minutes and you’ll be done. You need a break? Want to take a look?”
“Naw, I’ll wait. I want it complete the first time I see it on me.” Kelly knew his tone and the slight quiver in his words betrayed his disappointment. Skylar felt it too, based on how she turned back to his arm.
“Sounds good,” she said, her voice barely audible over the buzz of the needle.
True to her word, Skylar jammed the last drops of ink under Kelly’s skin minutes later and sat back, stretching the curl from her spine that came from hours of crouching over his arm. The smile on her face was muted and guilt stabbed at Kelly for the first time. He wanted to find words to help her understand it wasn’t her work making him upset while she gently dabbed away the stray ink and blood left on his arm. But all he found was a wrung-out blankness inside himself.
“Alright, you’re all set. You want to take a look before I cover it up?”
“Yeah, I do.”
Skylar gestured to a full-length mirror across the shop from her station and he stood to cross the room. Each step took more effort than Kelly felt capable of. When he finally stood in front of the mirror, he took a deep breath and turned his arm over. The tattoo was gorgeous and objectively perfect. Not a line out of place. Not a shade too dark or too light. The bright yellow petals of the sunflower anchored in brown disk flowers that looked like you could feel the light, soft fuzz covering them. The cross leapt from the middle of the skull like a light was shining on it from somewhere outside the image. And the words were so perfect he could actually imagine he’d used the tattoo gun to gouge them into his skin himself.
What really struck Kelly was the three-dimensional feeling the tattoo gave when he rotated his arm from side to side. Somehow, Skylar’s use of shadow and forced perspective made the image track with the eye of the person looking at it, centering itself effortlessly from a variety of angles. The effect felt somehow magical. And yet, all Kelly felt was a disappointment he couldn’t hide.
“So, how do you feel?” Skylar asked from across the room. Kelly turned to find her packing away her equipment.
“It’s… amazing. Truly.”
“Sounds like it.” She punctuated the disbelief in her tone with the snap of pulling one of her latex gloves off at the end of the sentence. She waved Kelly back over and he sat down so she could slather petroleum jelly on the tattoo and then cover it with a plastic bandage.
“No, seriously, I mean it. It’s truly impressive.”
“So why is it you look so…unimpressed.”
“It’s just…I don’t know how to put it. You ever get exactly what you wanted and it…wasn’t what you wanted?”
“I don’t even understand what that means.” She wrapped the last of the bandage around Kelly’s arm and handed him a stack of papers describing how to care for a new tattoo. “Follow those instructions, alright. You may not like that piece, but that’s no reason to fuck it up by not taking care of it right.”
Heat flared in Kelly’s face as he took the cash out of his wallet to pay her, $1,000 after he added in a $200 tip. He handed it to her, scooped up his papers including the note with his handwriting on it, and walked to the front of the shop. He was almost out the door when he turned back to find her watching him go.
“I really mean it, you know. It’s not the tattoo that bothers me.”
“What is it then?”
“I know this sounds weird, but I think I don’t know what to do with the fact that the reality is better than what I imagined. It’s like, somehow, that black ink makes it all perfect and that perfection makes me feel empty somehow.”
Skylar shook her head, her face softening a bit. She pulled her remaining glove off and tossed it in the trash can next to her before speaking.
“Maybe that isn’t so much about the tattoo as the skin it’s on.”
Kelly shrugged and pushed out into the near-midnight chill. The noise of traffic on the street swept him out into the parking lot and he was merging into that river of cars moments later. As he drove, he grimaced through each throb that came with even the slightest movement. It wasn’t until he was pulling onto the freeway that he realized it had never been about the tattoo. It was only ever about pain’s ugliness and what the body does to make that ugly beautiful as it ages in.
— MICHAEL DEAN CLARK
Michael Dean Clark is an author of fiction and literary nonfiction whose work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays and nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net consideration. It has appeared in Drunk Monkeys, Angel City Review, The Other Journal, Punctuate, and The Jabberwock Review among others. He lives and writes in Southern California.