Permanent Ink

by Avon Gale

  Poe

  As September ended and the weeks passed, we fell into a routine. I watched Jericho work his magic and tried to be patient as I waited for his approval—and my turn to take a tattoo machine in hand.

  Slowly, in between observing Jericho with his clients and cleaning up behind him and the other artists, I’d come to appreciate the artistry of tattooing, the skill and precision involved when working on a living, breathing canvas.

  Jericho did original designs all the time, but his specialty was transforming shitty tattoos into beautiful, intricate works of art. People came from other states to see him, which spoke highly of his reputation in the industry. You didn’t buy plane tickets, book hotels, and travel hundreds of miles for anything less than the best.

  It was in mid-October, almost a month into my apprenticeship, when I realized how badly I wanted it to work out. Jericho was finishing a piece for Wes, a local firefighter who’d been injured on the job last year. Wes’s arm was covered in scars from burns and skin grafts, and he’d come to Jericho for a hockey-themed sleeve. He loved the Blues, St. Louis’s NHL team, and he’d asked for their logo to be incorporated into the design.

  Today I was watching Jericho complete the final touches to the sleeve—mostly shading and accents to add depth and nuance. They’d been talking about the upcoming hockey season, something about PK percentages, defensive-zone coverage, and needing “more playmakers behind Tarasenko,” whatever the hell that meant. I didn’t know shit about the game beyond what I’d learned from watching The Mighty Ducks as a kid. I couldn’t contribute anything valuable to the conversation, and if I could, I wouldn’t have bothered. I was too fascinated by Jericho as he worked. By his big, steady hands and the way his dark brows drew together in concentration, his intense focus even as he joked and laughed with his client, his care while adding ink over the thick, ridged scars. It’d become a little bit of an addiction, watching Jericho. He was a master of the craft—I recognized that now—and it turned me on to witness such obvious skill. It also raised my respect for him another notch or two.

  What affected me the most was when Jericho finally finished and wiped down Wes’s arm so he could check it out in the mirror. Like with Valerie a couple of weeks ago, I saw the impact it had. Wes stood there blinking, his eyes overly bright. He hadn’t flinched during the tattooing, though the tender-looking skin must’ve been sensitive as fuck. Wes had endured the process with a smile, bantering easily with Jericho despite the pain. But seeing the finished product, realizing his scars were now camouflaged by a design he’d chosen himself, clearly overwhelmed him.

  Wes stared in the mirror for almost a full minute. Then he turned to Jericho and said “Thanks” in a voice so choked with emotion that I squirmed and tore my eyes away from his face.

  Jericho pulled him in for a quick, back-slapping hug. “You’re welcome. Let’s get that arm covered up, bud.” He wrapped the sleeve, then left the room to walk Wes to the front desk.

  Atop Jericho’s storage cabinet, his laptop was quietly streaming a folky punk song from his now-familiar Spotify playlist. It contained a bunch of music by some British dude named Frank Turner, whose style had slowly grown on me after repeated exposure.

  I hummed along to the song—something about not being his best and fixing messes—as I stood from my stool in the corner and lightly stretched my back. After snagging a pair of nitrile gloves from a box on the counter, I started cleaning Jericho’s workstation.

  My mind wandered as I tossed the dirty supplies and set Jericho’s tattoo machine aside to be sterilized. I kept picturing Wes’s expression as he stared at his completed sleeve. He’d looked so awed and thankful. Really fucking thankful.

  Jericho’s art did that. Jericho had helped Wes transform his scarred skin into something new. Not that Wes had anything to be ashamed of—especially because he’d gotten those scars while being a bad-ass and risking his life. But this . . . Well, this was Wes taking ownership of them and what people saw when they looked at him. Just as Valerie had done when she’d asked Jericho to transform a celebratory tattoo into a visual tribute.

  Someday I wanted to do that for someone. I wanted to help them move past an unexpected tragedy or mark a life-changing event. I wasn’t sure I could ever reach Jericho’s level of skill, though I’d been drawing since I could hold a pencil and writing graffiti since I was fourteen. I took the same pride in my pieces that Jericho took in his tattoos, but we worked with different mediums, and being good at one art form didn’t guarantee I’d be any good at the other. But I wanted to try. I knew this wasn’t an opportunity Jericho had offered lightly. Most people took one look at me and instantly dismissed me, shoving me into the category of delinquent or dumb punk kid who’ll never amount to much.

  Jericho hadn’t. He’d looked at me and seen potential. He’d given my life direction when I hadn’t known I needed it.

  I shouldn’t have cared about his approval or his opinions, but the better I got to know him, the more I wanted to earn his respect, prove his faith in me hadn’t been misplaced. I wanted to hear him call me Poe, not kid, and I wanted him to see me as an equal. When that day came, maybe I’d ask him to fix the jacked-up tattoo on my hip. But not before then.

  I met Blue at our favorite diner for dinner one night before we went out bombing freight cars. The moment I walked in, I spotted him at a booth in the corner. My best friend was and always had been hard to miss. He kept his wavy, dark-brown hair in a messy topknot; his skin seemed permanently tanned from all the time he spent outdoors; and no matter what the season, he pretty much lived in tank tops, skinny jeans, and Chucks.

  Blue never liked to be confined. If he wasn’t at work or asleep, he was outside doing something—skating in search of our next spot to hit; loitering near the mural wall along the river, where graffiti artists convened for Paint Louis once a year; or likeliest of all, hanging out in Forest Park.

  Most people who met him assumed Blue was a nickname. But nope, I’d seen the proof on his license once. Blue and both his sisters had color names. Lavender, the older one, and Jade, the younger. He didn’t see or talk about them much, but I’d known them back in high school, when I first met Blue as a freshman. He’d been a junior at the time, Lavender a senior, and Jade came in when I was in my last year, after Blue had already graduated.

  His parents had always been apathetic at best, outright negligent at worst. I never understood why they’d bothered having kids if they didn’t actually plan to pay attention to or give a shit about them. Some people, like the Rosses and my mother, just shouldn’t be allowed to procreate. Blue hated both his mom and his dad. As far as I knew, he hadn’t seen them since he left home. They weren’t exactly the type of family that valued togetherness.

  Blue jerked his chin at me when I settled into the seat across from him. A pile of empty creamer containers littered the table, proof that he was already on his second or third cup of coffee.

  “How’s things?” I asked.

  Blue grunted, his eyes darkening. “Same bullshit as usual. My roommates are annoying assholes. My bosses piss me off daily.”

  He worked at one of those Tex-Mex chain restaurants that offered like fifty things on the menu, all of which were mediocre. I’d never witnessed him in action as a server because he’d threatened me with dismemberment if I ever showed up there. I couldn’t actually picture it, to be honest. Genuine smiles from Blue were as blinding and infrequent as solar eclipses. He had to really like you to bestow one upon you, and Blue could barely tolerate the majority of the population. When he forced a smile for customers, they probably feared for their lives. But somehow he’d lasted ten months at this place, which made it the record holder in Blue’s job history.

  His looks probably helped. Blue might sport a disgruntled expression nearly twenty-four seven, but he was gorgeous. A lot of people gave pretty folk a free pass on being dickish.

  I was one of the few people Blue genuinely cared about, though, so I got to see a side of him f
ew others did. Most of the time anyway. Blue had always been prone to mood swings. I’d heard a word once in English class that described him perfectly: mercurial. Maybe it was fitting that he loved to paint the sky. It was always changing too.

  Blue didn’t ask me how the apprenticeship was going, but I didn’t expect him to. The tattooing had become a point of contention between us over the last few weeks. He’d been fine when I was working the front desk at Permanent Ink, but the moment Jericho had offered me the apprenticeship, things changed. Blue didn’t like it, and he hadn’t been shy about saying so.

  “The court stuff went okay today,” I told him to prevent him from launching into another rant on the subject of tattooing. “Landon’s pissed, but at least I won’t have to go back. That lawyer he hired is good. Got me off with some fines. But he did say it might not be so easy if I get caught again.”

  St. Louis had a love-hate relationship with graffiti artists. Back in the mid-nineties, when Paint Louis first started as a hip-hop event, it was only a small group of street artists writing on the floodwall, and no one really cared. Then came the time a bunch of artists descended and bombed the city, causing a shitload of outrage and property damage. That shut it down for over a decade. It had only restarted a few years ago and, with the city’s approval, happened annually ever since. But outside of that one weekend, and that one location, they didn’t exactly appreciate their buildings being tagged.

  “You won’t get caught again,” Blue said. “We’ll be more careful from now on.”

  “Hopefully.” But it was part of the risk we took. I opened my menu and looked it over briefly. I didn’t know why I bothered, when I always ordered the pancake combo. Habit, I guessed.

  The waitress stopped, took our orders, and rushed off again. There weren’t many tables filled, but she was the only server on the floor. She wasn’t pausing to chat with anyone. Not that I minded.

  “Did you finish the sketch?” Blue asked.

  “Yep.” I dug my piece book out of my backpack and slid it across the table to him.

  Blue flipped right to the page, the concept drawing I’d done for our heaven spot piece. We’d be hitting it up as soon as we could afford all of the supplies.

  He traced his fingers over what I’d drawn, then nodded his approval, gifting me with a rare smile. “It’s fucking perfect. Azure and Raven are finally getting up.”

  He’d been writing under Azure since I first met him. I’d asked him once why he’d picked that for a name when it was just another shade of blue, but he’d only shrugged. I thought, for him, it had become like a brand of sorts, so why not embrace it? The color blue featured heavily in his work. Oceans, storms, skyscapes. Not that I could say much. Using Raven when my real name was Poe was probably equally cliché, but I was naturally drawn to skulls and darker colors, as if even my subconscious tried to keep with the themes of death and loss in Edgar Allan Poe’s writing. Maybe Blue and I really were a match made in graffiti heaven.

  When our food arrived, Blue started telling me about some rumors he’d heard. Another day, another blowup. The graffiti world was small and sometimes more dramatic than reality television.

  “Some dude is apparently going over Evol’s paintings,” Blue said around a mouthful of his pot roast sandwich. “He’s hit three of his pieces already.”

  I munched on a slice of bacon. “No word on who it is?”

  Blue shook his head. “Nope. No one recognizes the signature, but Evol is gonna mess his ass up when he finds him.”

  I could believe it. Evol was one of the more disreputable members of our crew. He’d been in lockup before, though he’d never tell us why. He was a “punch first, ask questions later” type of guy, and I did my best to stay on his good side.

  We speculated over who might be covering his pieces, while finishing our food. No one immediately sprang to mind, but we weren’t the only crew in St. Louis. It could also be someone totally new. Evol would either have to catch the person in the act or wait to confront him until the dude revealed himself.

  I was glad to be discussing drama that didn’t revolve around me for once, but I knew how rage-inducing it felt to have someone go over your work. It was a huge sign of disrespect. If they were specifically targeting his pieces, Evol had most likely pissed someone off.

  After paying our bill, we skated to one of the rail yards nearby.

  Bombing freight cars was what we did when we wanted something quick and easy. New ones came in as the other ones got shipped out, so we constantly had to re-mark our territory.

  I started on one while Blue took the one next to it. We weren’t trying to draw attention, so we mostly stayed quiet. When we did talk, it was in whispers.

  For a while, there was only the distant rumble of traffic and the hiss from our spray cans as we wrote. We were almost finished when Blue finally spoke.

  “You know, I don’t get it, man. You’ve never given a shit about tattooing.” He stepped back from the freight car, scrutinizing his tag with a critical eye, then tossed the cannon into his backpack, where it landed with a thunk.

  Blue turned to me, his scowl shadowed but visible in the orange-tinted glow from a nearby light pole. “I never thought I’d see you sell out. Art is about making a statement, not getting paid. Now you’re gonna, what, waste your talent doing shitty swallows or tramp-stamp butterflies for the rest of your life?”

  I sighed. I’d hoped he would leave the subject alone, but of course I wouldn’t be so lucky. “First of all, those tattoos have their place, okay. Second, the people who come into Permanent Ink don’t want anything so uninspired. They want one of a kind. They want us to create designs that reflect both their personalities and our individual styles.”

  That was what appealed to me most—the freedom to infuse a bit of myself, my originality, into an image someone would wear etched into their skin forever. I couldn’t think of a better canvas or a better compliment to me as an artist than someone trusting me to physically alter their appearance.

  “If I get good enough, people will recognize my work, like they do Banksy or ROA or Shepard Fairey. I could make a name for myself.”

  Blue scoffed. “You’re already making a name. We’re gonna be up someday soon.”

  I dropped the can I’d been using into my own bag. Spray paint fumes hung heavy in the air, and my fingertips were stained with black—the color I used for my tag, the signature I left on my pieces. “Yeah, well, not fast enough, dude. And it’s not paying my bills. I don’t want to spend the rest of my days eating ramen and drinking tap water for the sake of keeping my art ‘pure.’ I’d like to move out of Landon’s basement sometime this century.”

  Blue shook his head, causing a chunk of wavy hair to fall across his brow from his messy bun. He shoved it back with an impatient hand. “Art is sacrifice, Poe. Do you think van Gogh would’ve sunk to doing tattoos for cash?”

  I rolled my eyes. “I think he, like a lot of artists, died broke as hell and probably would’ve been grateful for any job that paid him to create, to be honest.”

  “It’s not just about the money! Art is for the people. It always has been. We’re part of the goddamn revolution!” Blue fisted his hands at his sides, his sinewy arms tense. The tank top he wore hung loose on his lean frame, a contrast to the skinny jeans that clung to his legs like he’d poured himself into them. Pants were the only things he ever wore tight, and even then, he spent a lot of time in baggy sweats.

  “Dude, can we not?” I said. “You’re being so fucking extra right now. I mean, what’s the problem? Why do you care that I’m doing this apprenticeship? I’m still out here with you at two in the goddamn morning, ain’t I?”

  Blue’s eyes narrowed. Normally they were whiskey-brown, but the darkness leached them of their warmth. “Don’t do me any favors.”

  I kicked my backpack in frustration, sending a cannon rolling to the edge of the tracks. “Look, I’m here because I want to be. I’m with you, all right? But I’m doing the apprenticesh
ip too, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t, like, give me shit about it constantly.”

  Blue bent to collect his bag and skateboard. “Whatever.”

  I caught his arm before he could walk away. Blue had been my best friend since I was fourteen and he was sixteen. We’d been inseparable ever since. No one else got me the way he did, even if we didn’t always see eye to eye. But, for the first time, I was branching out into something that didn’t include him. Obviously, he wasn’t adjusting very well. “Don’t be mad.”

  Blue shrugged my hand off but didn’t say anything.

  A sigh broke free before I could stop it. “I thought you’d be happy for me, man. You didn’t care when I worked at the gas station. What’s the difference?”

  “Don’t play dumb. You know what the difference is.”

  I huffed out a breath. “Okay, fine. But, like, I still don’t see why it’s a problem. There are probably about a dozen ways I could fuck this all up. I’ve only been shadowing Jericho for a month. I might be total shit at tattooing.”

  “You won’t be.”

  I would’ve been flattered had Blue’s voice not been as flat as paper. “How about we don’t talk about it, then? We’ll agree to disagree and move on. It doesn’t have anything to do with us or our plans.”

  After nearly a minute of silence, Blue tipped his chin. “Yeah, fine. Later.” He stalked off without another word.

  I rolled my eyes at his retreating back. He’d agreed. That was the important thing. We could declare a personal gag order on the tattoo talk. I didn’t want to argue anymore.

  I retrieved my wayward spray can, packed my bag, and grabbed my skateboard. Once I reached solid concrete instead of gravel, I dropped the board, stepped one foot on, and pushed off with the other, heading for home.

  Revolution, my ass. Don’t get me wrong—I agreed with Blue that art should be for the people. During my conversation with Jericho, I’d defended graffiti with the same zeal Blue usually did. But, unlike Blue, I could easily envision a different path for myself, and I liked it. I wasn’t about to change my mind about tattooing because Blue had a problem with me using my skills to earn a living. He needed to get the hell over himself, or someday soon it might become a serious issue.