by John Everson
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YOU NEVER GOT USED TO THE NEEDLE
“Let me tell you something about my tattoos,” the artist said. “When I draw on you it is not just a picture; with my ink I will scratch into your soul. My art is deeper than skin.”
Right now it felt like the needles were penetrating his soul.
You never got used to the needle.
Talman grit his teeth and closed his eyes. It was always difficult, but today it seemed worse than ever. Normally, after the first sting of the needle a warm fuzzy glow spread out across his body from the start of the tattoo. He would close his eyes and the world would become a haze of pain and blood. As the artist worked, he could feel the image growing across his skin, spreading out from its center to embrace him, to own him. He was the artist’s canvas, as the needles wove their ink indelibly into his skin. As he grew used to the pain, his mind slipped away. At first he was anchored by the fire in his flesh, but after a while, Talman could see beyond the tiny rooms with their tawdry pictures and dark stained floors.
Every town was the same. Every town had a tattoo parlor that blared its trade in neon screams and called to young and old to decorate the skeins of their lives in garish ink.
There was almost always a girl at the counter with dark hair and painted eyes and arms that spoke of storybook nightmares and whimsical dreams. Sometimes, Talman stared deep into their ocher eyes and marveled at the emptiness there. But mostly, he bypassed the girls and moved straight to the artist and asked if he or she could do something special.
The artists were often cast from a similar mold as well. They wore shirts with sleeves ripped out in order to display both their skills and demons in Technicolor flexing. Sometimes their heads were shaved and sometimes their skulls bore the imprint of another’s needle—at least Talman hoped it was another’s. He couldn’t fathom how somebody could stitch a picture into his own scalp, though he had met artists who claimed to have done every one of their tattoos, from the snakes around their thighs to the dragons on their backs, using their own hands and a mirror. He couldn’t imagine. Even after three dozen designs carved in his skin, Talman still squinted back tears and struggled to slip away from the moment of inking.
He would think about the circus, and Skyy. He would think about the children, and pray that they were all right. Ever since the death of Yvette, the circus’ eight-breasted woman, he and Skyy had acted as surrogate parents to Yvette’s babies, Skyy’s siblings. He worried most about Sal, the three-headed hermaphrodite. How could the child ever survive with so many choices to make?
But today he felt far from Sal and the circus and Skyy. He had stalked away from the circus grounds early in the morning, as Skyy still breathed softly in sleep. He’d been awake most of the night again, haunted by the feeling that something wasn’t right. The ache in his heart had grown with each passing day for weeks. He couldn’t put his finger on the reason, but Talman was troubled. Skyy sensed it, he knew. Each night she tried to lull him to sleep with kisses and caresses, but Talman only rolled away. He wasn’t happy anymore, and there was nothing she or anyone else could do about it.
So this morning, he’d done what he always did when he felt lost. He’d taken a long walk that led straight to a tattoo parlor. A place where he could mask pain with art. But with the art, came the agony of the needle. And the needle was doing its work now.
The pain was all-encompassing; it was all he could focus on. It was all that there was. He could feel the artist’s needles dipping deeper and deeper into his flesh, injecting their bloody ink closer and closer to his core.
He had covered his body in the past with pictures of snakes, fairies, skulls, dragons and all manner of mythical, colorful creatures. The children loved him to bend and flex and reveal the mysteries beneath his shirt. And when he bared his leg they’d shriek in fear of its wickedly snarling black demon of death. He had thought that the ancient serpent that coiled from his left thigh up around his belly button was the most painful tattoo he could experience. But this latest tattoo struck straight to the heart.
And that was the artist’s intention.
Talman could feel the pound in his chest drumming faster and faster as the needles penetrated the flesh just above its cage of bones. This was a new magic; the artist had promised that this tattoo was not of some fictional beast or some mythical god. When Talman had entered the tiny tattoo shop in Parkville, Illinois he had stood alone for many minutes staring at the colorful walls. The pictures here were not the normal sort of tattoo artist showings. Oh, there were the grinning skulls and the burlesque tarts and the snarling dragons and more, but somehow these tattoos, these pictures, seemed more real, more intricate than any he had seen before. Perhaps it was because of the shop’s darkness, for there was no girl waiting at the counter to tease and encourage. And Talman saw no artist waiting at the back room. He had been ready to leave, turning towards the door when a voice called out, “Can I help you?”
Talman turned to see an old man with white hair shuffling from a back hall. The man was polishing something with white cloth.
“Maybe,” Talman said. “I’m looking for something special, something really unique. I’m the “tattooed man” for a circus, so I can’t get away with the usual blue and red dragons. When our barker introduces me, he tells everyone that my body will ‘inspire, and amuse, and frighten.’ Is there someone here who has the skill to help me? To give me something truly different?”
The old man slipped the white cloth in his pocket, perched a thin pair of glasses on his nose, looked him over a moment, and then nodded. “I may be able to help you.”
The man’s hand tremored as he held it out to shake, and Talman raised an eyebrow.
“You can draw well?” he asked.
“I don’t just draw on your skin,” the old man grinned. “I draw on your soul.”
“I ain’t got no soul,” Talman shook his head and blurted. “I’ve just got skin. And I need to use it well. You can’t be the tattooed man of the circus if you don’t have some real art on your parts.”
He waved a hand around the shop. “Are these pictures of your work?”
“Pictures only tell a part of the story,” the old tattoo artist said, but he rose and walked stiffly to retrieve a black binder tucked beneath a white formica counter.
“The real story is in here,” the artist nodded, tapping a gnarled finger to his equally weathered forehead. “And here,” he repeated, tapping his chest.
Talman took the binder and paged past its cover, instantly sighing in awe of the intricate twinings, lifelike portraits and bleeds of patterned color displayed on arms and legs and necks via 4x6” photos there.
The old man nodded. “My work is never simple,” he said, “and its life stretches beyond its canvas. Sit with me and talk awhile and let’s consider the manner of your tattoo.”
He gently pulled the binder away from Talman.
“Let’s not talk of books or patterns. You said you need something different than the rest, so it won’t do to look at things that others already have. Let’s talk awhile, and from there your own particular image will grow.”
Talman shrugged and humored the old man, following him to the back of the shop to sit in old, cracked red vinyl chairs. They talked about each and every design that covered his body, from the mundane skull grinning amid decaying roses drawn when he was just 16 to the more recent, more elaborate serpents, clowns and mystical symbols. Gradually he told the old man of how it started. Of how he would get tattoos to hide the bruises and scars and cigarette burns left by his stepfather and of how he’d joined the circus to leave that abuse behind. He told the man of how he’d stood at the deathbed of the circus matriarch Yvette and watched as she bore freak after three-headed freak before expiring in the arms of the ringmaster. He told of how he fell in love with the matriarch’s daughter Skyy, and how they struggled to keep the circus on the road moving from town to town never stopping, never resting.
“But why?” the artist asked
. “Why did you stay with them, why didn’t you go to school? Do you really want your whole life to revolve ‘round the colors of your skin?”
“It’s as good a job as any,” Talman said.
“Do you care about your patrons?”
“They pay us.” Talman shrugged. “What more do I need to care about?”
“What are you running from now?” the man asked. Talman looked away. A moment passed while neither spoke.
“Take off your shirt.”
Talman didn’t question. He already had lifted the shirt before to show the serpent and the dragon wings crossing his back. Now he rolled the white T-shirt over the top of his head with a single pull and the old man appraised him slowly, walking around and around him, one finger to his lips, nodding.
“There is room on your chest,” the old man said. “You already have heart, but how would like to have some more?”
“What, we’re going to put a valentine on my chest?” Talman laughed, but the old man did not smile.
“Let me tell you something about my tattoos,” he said. “When I draw on you it is not just a picture; with my ink I will scratch into your soul. My art is deeper than skin.”
««—»»
On the way back to the circus grounds, Talman felt weak. Getting a tattoo always left him a little knock-kneed, but this was worse than usual. His entire chest seemed seared. It tingled as if a cascade of blue electric arcs ranged across it. He forced himself not to touch the bruised, angry spot in the center of his chest; he didn’t want to ruin the heavy sheen of antibiotic ointment that glistened there.
The main street was lightly trafficked for a sunny mid-summer afternoon, but Talman felt oddly clumsy, as if no matter which way he turned, he couldn’t get out of people’s way. He dodged and weaved at every passerby.
A small boy in a black and yellow striped shirt caught him unaware from behind. As the boy shoved past him and darted away, Talman’s chest seemed to burn hotter than before. The tattoo above his heart seemed alive with electricity, and both boy and street faded for a second.
The child ran into the Hobby Shop at the end of the block. The boy threw open the door and raced across stained yellowing tile towards an aisle overflowing with boxes and boxes of model cars and space cruisers. He grabbed at a model of a red Mustang convertible, and held it up. “This one,” he cried out to the store.
The vision slipped away and the street was back. Talman could see the yellow and black shirt a block away, still darting in and out of passersby, a zig-zagging Charlie Brown.
What the hell was that? he thought to himself. He shrugged, and checked his step to stare through the window of a pawn shop. Instantly, the warm crush of another shoulder slapped into his own.
“Excuse me,” a voice rapped sharply.
Talman turned back to see a wizened old woman with silvered hair pulled up in a beehive and horn-rimmed glasses scowling over her shoulder at him, though she didn’t slow her march.
The strangest thing happened. The harrumphing woman’s back shivered and slipped, as if in mirage. Again the street slipped away. Day faded to night and Talman was in a small, dark room.
An old man in blue pajamas slept peacefully on a bed piled high with blankets and pillows. The old woman stood at the head of the bed, her two gnarled, blue-veined hands poised just above the man’s face. They held something that glittered in the dim light of a candle flickering on a dresser.
Her bony hands came down, and he saw what she held. Long silver knitting needles. She brought them down fast to punch with an audible clap into the ears of the old man. Black blood spurted onto the shadowy bed, and the man’s body jerked from snores to frenzied spasms.
Talman’s heart triple jumped and the vision vanished. He stumbled and fell to the pavement as daylight and the street sprang back to his eyes. The old woman was just a few steps behind him, moving with authority.
Talman scrambled back to his feet. His new tattoo burned like fire and he stepped off of the sidewalk to lean against the building. Nobody seemed to have noticed his spill. He shook his head and stared at the hard white cement at his feet, waiting for it to turn into something or someplace else. When he was satisfied that it wouldn’t shimmer away into a vision of murder, he began to walk again towards the edge of town. As the blocks slipped by, his step grew faster and faster.
He crossed the open field behind the town’s lone grocery store, and at last the gravel of the fairground parking lot crunched underfoot. The dirty canvas of the Big Top beckoned comfort like a well-worn coat; he longed to slip inside its mildewed folds.
Skyy was working the ticket booth. She grinned at his approach and ran up to give him a quick peck on the cheek. At her light embrace his chest seemed to burn with a sudden blaze of heat.
“Where’ve you been?” she asked. “I was starting to worry.” She stepped back and after a penetrating gaze shook her head. “You got another one, didn’t you?”
He nodded.
Skyy rolled her eyes. “You’re going to run out of room before you’re 25, you know that? What is it this time—a swamp demon? A vampire?” When he didn’t answer immediately, she raised an eyebrow and guessed, “a girly-girl?”
“A heart.”
She blushed. “With my name in it?”
“Just a heart. I’ll show you later.”
Skyy stepped back to the booth to deal with the growing line of patrons and made change for a $10 bill.
“Better get to the show tent,” she warned. Then with a flash of cheer she nodded to the next customer. “Welcome to the Barnett and Staley Circus, the strangest show on earth!”
Talman changed out of his walking clothes and into his red silk and gold-fringed costume. He buttoned the shirt gingerly, cringing as the fabric stuck and slipped across his wounded skin. He wanted to lie down and sleep for a day. But while the tattoo gave a good excuse for feeling like that today, the fact was, Talman felt like that more and more lately. He was burnt out. When he’d met Skyy, just months before, he was just a kid looking for a way out. He’d seen it in Skyy and the circus. Their life seemed ideal; self-contained, they moved from town to town, never staying long enough to get bored, never falling into the rut of the mundane 9-5 day-in and day-out. Every week they woke up in a different town, and while the show remained the same, the people around them always changed. Endless interest.
What he hadn’t foreseen was that constant, tedious packing and unpacking and the fact that while the faces in the audience changed, those were not the faces he ever interacted with. In some ways, the circus was more isolating than being stuck in a 9-5 rut in an office building. At least when you lived in the same town, at the end of the day you could build new relationships with different friends you could choose to see again and again…or your bartender. But the only relationship that Talman could build was here, in his closed community. His work was his home and his town. After a while, it all got stale.
Talman stabbed his shirt tail into his pants and clenched his teeth, willing the feeling away. The circus was his life now, and his family. They had taken him in, and Skyy had taken his heart. He should need no more than this, want no more than this. He blew his nose and forced the moisture from the corner of his eye to dry in the tissue. Need and want knew no boundaries, listened to no leash. Taking a deep breath he fled the changing room to take his place on the wings of the stage.
The show must go on.
“And for your artistic pleasure, we bring to you the man of mystery, the man of art, a man illustrated with your dreams and terrors. He collects your secret thoughts and wears them proudly on his skin. We bring you, ‘the tattooed man.’”
Talman took his cue and strode proudly onto the stage, bowing at the proffered hand of the ringmaster.
This was a more intimate audience than the center stage, and the performer moved from face to face at the tiny stage’s edge, flexing his leaping biceps skull, and stretching to allow them a glimpse of the deadly shivering snake that wound ‘round his t
orso. The ringmaster called the shots, telling Talman when to allow the paying crowd to see the hidden dragon at his thigh and begging their attention as the tattooed man shed his shirt and long pants to display the full breadth of his well-inked body. His skin glowed in the narrowed spotlight, dragons and snakes and deadly teeth laughing and prowling across his skin for the patrons who oohed when expected and aahed when suggested.
Talman had thrived on the attention at first, but now he only went through the motions. He knew that it didn’t matter that it was him on the stage. All the crowd wanted was a garishly painted man; someone whose excess would make them feel secure in themselves. They didn’t care about the beauty of the illustrations, or their meaning. They only reveled in the freakishness of it all, and walked out saying, “thank God, I don’t look like that.” Talman’s tattoos set him farther apart than he already was, and that gulf made his audience feel good. But for Talman, it only accentuated the realization that he was alone.
Even with Skyy, and his newfound family of performers and fellow freaks, he was alone.
Sometimes, after his shows, he would stand behind the tent as the chattering patrons filed away to lose money on the watergun and frog-leaping “games of chance” on the Midway, and cry.
When he was a kid, his stepdad had beaten him, literally, and he’d hoped that attention meant he was loved. Now, he was surrounded by people who loved him, and he felt completely isolated.
Talman finished displaying his tattoos and smiled and bowed his way off the stage to applause. He slipped behind the tent to crouch down until the grass tickled his thigh like feather kisses. A salty flow quickly kissed his lips with heat, and with the back of a hand he roughly brushed aside the wetness his eyes betrayed.
“Mister, are you okay?” a tiny voice asked at his elbow.
Talman flinched, and roughed a hand across his eyes once more.
A young boy stared at him from around the edge of the sideshow tent. He looked about six, and was dressed in stiff blue jeans and a too-old-for-him striped button shirt. His head was covered in freckles and fiery orange hair.
