Poison Ink

by Christopher Golden

  Silently she said a little prayer that this Dante guy would turn them away, solving her dilemma.

  T.Q. stepped off the curb and crossed the street toward the tattoo shop, and the others followed. Halfway across, Letty realized Sammi still stood on the sidewalk and glanced back at her, brows knitted, wondering what she was up to.

  Taking a deep breath, Sammi hurried to catch up to them.

  “You all right?” Letty asked, her voice soft with concern.

  “I hate needles. And pain,” Sammi said. These were not lies, nor were they the whole truth.

  “It’ll be fine,” Letty said.

  They gathered together in front of the black windows. Sammi glanced around at her friends as they all hesitated, and their faces were bathed in that peculiar blue neon glow. They looked like ghosts.

  “Place gives me the creeps,” she said, unable to stop herself. “What’s it even called? It doesn’t have a name? He could be doing anything in there.”

  T.Q. stared at the front door. “You heard what Letty said. He doesn’t ask any questions. You break the rules, that’s not the kind of thing you advertise.”

  Several seconds went by without any of them moving. Even Letty seemed reluctant now that the moment had arrived. Then Katsuko reached out to open the door. She tugged on the handle.

  “It’s locked,” Sammi said. “Must be closed.”

  Letty frowned. “No way. The Open sign is always on, yeah. But I heard the guy’s almost always here.”

  She rapped on the blacked-out-glass and metal door. “It’s Saturday night. He’s not gonna close on a Saturday night.”

  Seconds later they heard someone cough inside. The lock clicked and the door opened a few inches, pushed from within. The eyes that peered out from within were icy blue, bright and ethereal, and Sammi felt their gaze fix on her.

  When the door swung wider and they got a better look at the man holding it open, butterflies fluttered in her stomach. He had shoulder-length black hair, dark stubble on his chin, and the deep olive skin of the Mediterranean. He might have been Greek or Spanish or Italian or even Egyptian; Sammi could not tell. Wherever he came by his looks, one thing was certain—he was a beautiful man.

  “Well,” he said with just a trace of exotic, unfamiliar accent, “what has fate brought to my doorstep this evening?”

  Sammi felt herself blush. Those icy blue eyes were like nothing she’d ever seen. At the same time, she realized that though it felt as if he were looking directly at her, he had that effect on all of them. Even Letty, who didn’t like guys, seemed captivated by him. And who talked that way, especially in Covington?

  “Hi,” Letty said, nervous. “Are you Dante?”

  With a smile of delight, he regarded them all again. “I am. Which means you aren’t lost.”

  Katsuko spoke up. “Are you open? For business?”

  Dante’s eyes narrowed. “For customers who aren’t going to get me into trouble.”

  “We aren’t,” Letty said quickly. “My cousin told me you could help us. Ana Mattei? You know her?”

  Dante considered the question a moment. “I know a lot of girls.”

  I’ll bet you do, Sammi thought, and the warmth of her blush deepened.

  “We won’t get you into trouble,” Caryn said, with a desperation in her voice that Sammi did not like at all. “I swear.”

  The tattoo artist hesitated, but something about the way those wintry blue eyes sparkled made Sammi think this was just mischief. He had already made up his mind.

  “Why don’t you come in and tell me what you want?” Dante said.

  Sammi saw the relief in her friends’ faces, but her stomach was still filled with butterflies. The threshold of the store might not actually have been the point of no return, but it certainly felt like it. She knew she should hold back, just bail on the whole thing right now. But she couldn’t stand the thought of hurting the girls like that.

  Letty led the way into the nameless shop, and the others followed. Sammi was the last to enter. No bells tinkled above the door, and when it closed behind her, the blacked-out windows made her feel as if they were in some bunker, far underground. Inside Dante’s shop only a few lights burned. He had an artist’s drafting table set up in one corner, and most of the light came from the bright lamp that shone down on the designs he had been working on.

  Dante picked up a bottle of lemon-flavored water that sat open on a filing cabinet and took a sip, then turned toward them, one eyebrow raised.

  “All right. We’re behind closed doors, just the six of us. Talk to me.”

  He wore a black shirt with a V-neck. The sleeves were rolled up halfway to his elbows, and for the first time, Sammi got a good look at some of the art on his skin. Entranced, she could not help staring. What little she could see of the tattoos on his chest showed her the head of a fierce lion with golden eyes and long red scars upon its face, and the tattoo on his forearms revealed twin goddesses, one grim and cruel and one lovely and pure.

  Letty had started to talk to Dante, introducing all the girls by name, but Sammi had missed much of what she said while staring at his tattoos. She wondered about him, about those blue eyes on such a man. The tattooist seemed such an exotic creature to her.

  “We don’t want to pick something out of a book,” Katsuko said, shaking her hair back and sliding her hands into her pockets.

  “It has to be something that’s just for us, that only the five of us will ever have,” Letty went on. She shrugged almost bashfully. “It’s a best friends thing, y’know?”

  Dante nodded. His smile, sort of lopsided, had a warmth and charm that gave him total command of the room.

  “I think I do,” he said. “Wish I’d had friends that mattered that much to me. I won’t even give you the usual warnings about how difficult it is to remove tattoos and how you should really think about it so that you don’t regret it later.”

  T.Q. had been quiet, as usual, from the moment they entered the shop. Now she seemed to come alive. “We haven’t thought about much of anything else all week. In fact, Caryn—”

  “Hang on,” Dante said, holding up a hand. He went to his drawing table. He seemed almost to have forgotten they were there. Pushing aside his work, he placed a fresh sheet of paper on the table in front of him and picked up a pencil.

  Sammi glanced at Caryn. T.Q. had tried to bring up her sketches, but Dante had interrupted. Someone should have said something to him, but for the moment they were all captivated by him. Sketching quickly, Dante drew a small circle—perhaps an inch in diameter—and then began to design around it. At first Sammi thought the sketch represented some stylized image of the sun, or a star, with rays of light coming off it in lines that curled to the left.

  Then Dante picked up a pen and started inking black lines over the pencil sketch. The central circle became heavy and thick, leaving only a small, round blank in the middle, like the eye of the storm.

  “It’s a hurricane, or a tornado, something like that,” she said.

  The tattooist smiled and glanced up at her, and Sammi realized they were the first words she had spoken since coming into the shop.

  “It’s meant to be many things at once,” Dante said, returning his attention to his work. “Kinda like friendship.”

  He continued inking in the little hooked fingers that extended from that central circle, marching around the circumference counterclockwise. It reminded Sammi also of Egyptian hieroglyphics they’d studied in ancient history the year before.

  Dante paused and straightened up, cocked his head, and studied the design. Apparently satisfied, he discarded the pen and picked up an eraser to remove any stray traces of pencil.

  “Is it some kind of eye?” Katsuko asked.

  The tattooist looked up from the table, his expression unreadable, but Sammi thought the question had irked him somehow.

  “It shows the power of the storm,” Dante said, with a smiling nod to Sammi. “Friendship is like that, isn’t it? Gathering i
n strength, all of its elements—each of you—working together, becoming more than you could ever be on your own. Nothing can stand in the path of the storm.

  “But like I said, it’s many things.” With one long finger, he pointed to the ring at the center. “This is the core, the world itself, the bond you share. Circling the world is the ocean, and here are the five of you, waves on the water.”

  Sammi saw that he meant the curling prongs that swept up from the outer rim of the sphere, and felt foolish that she had not seen that before. There were five of those stylized waves, one representing each of them. As they watched, Dante added small dots around the waves that might have been stars in the sky above the world, or parts of the storm, whatever metaphor they wanted to use to interpret the design.

  “It’s beautiful,” Letty breathed, staring at the drawing as the tattooist put down his pen.

  There were fans blowing in the shop, a small one in this front room and at least one larger one in the back. Sammi could hear the buzz through the half-open door that led back there. Despite the fans, the shop had begun to grow uncomfortably warm. She reached back and lifted her hair off her neck.

  T.Q. looked a bit flushed, but whether from the heat or embarrassment or excitement, Sammi couldn’t tell.

  “It is,” the redhead said. “It is beautiful, and very cool of you, but we’ve actually got…Caryn, she’s an artist. She designed a bunch of—”

  Dante glanced at Caryn. “I’m sorry. I should’ve heard you out before I let inspiration run away with me. If you’ve already picked something out, that’s fine. Can I see your designs?”

  Caryn reached for her back pocket, where she’d carried the folded-up designs they had all discussed at Letty’s. On the way over here they had all seemed unanimous about which design they liked best. Now, though, Caryn hesitated, then gave a small shrug.

  “Yours is much better.”

  “But we want something just for us,” Katsuko said, all business. “Unique.”

  Letty touched the edge of the artist’s drawing table, staring at Dante’s design. “This is unique. I love what Caryn did, especially the Pisces kind of thing with the fish, but this is, like, the perfect symbol for us. Don’t you guys see it?”

  T.Q. nodded, crossing her arms. “Yeah. I see it. I just don’t want to see it on anybody else if it’s supposed to be ours.”

  Dante slid off his chair and stood. He put a hand on Letty’s shoulder and reached out to touch T.Q.’s arm. Both girls drew stares wherever they went, and at school were considered startlingly beautiful. According to a lot of guys Sammi knew, T.Q. seemed unapproachable to them. They mistook her shyness for disdain, as though her academic ability made her think herself their superior. In truth, guys made her nervous as hell, and whatever she saw in the mirror, Simone Deveaux did not think herself beautiful. Most guys left Letty alone simply because she was a lesbian, although some of them flirted with her harder because of it, as though that were a kind of game for them.

  Next to Dante, both girls seemed only ordinary.

  Letty smiled when he touched her shoulder. T.Q. flinched and shifted her weight from one foot to the other, blushing furiously.

  The tattooist seemed not to notice. He looked around at the other girls, at Katsuko, then Caryn, and finally at Sammi.

  “I won’t pressure you. But the design exists because you came into my place looking for something special, and that inspired me. I created this for you. If you like it, I promise you I’ll never tattoo it on anyone else. No one else in the world will have it. You can take the design with you when you leave.”

  The other girls all exchanged glances, and the reality of the reason for this visit swept over Sammi again. She could see just from their eyes and from their body language that Dante had persuaded them.

  Hell, he’d persuaded Sammi, too. His design was perfect for them. She felt a tingling pleasure at the idea of having it tattooed on her skin, a silent rebellion taking place in her head. But her parents might never forgive her.

  She’d never felt so torn.

  Letty took a deep breath and looked around at her friends with a nervous, coquettish smile. “I’ll go first.”

  Dante clapped his hands happily. “Excellent!”

  He did not bother to check their IDs or even ask them how old they were. With a playful glint in those pale, wintry blue eyes, he led the way through the door into the back of the shop, and they all followed.

  If the front of the shop existed as the artist’s studio, the room they now entered was his operating room. Sammi took it all in, thinking that it looked a lot like a dentist’s office. On one side of the room sat a heavy-duty reclining chair, and on the other a padded table that looked like something from a doctor’s examination room. Next to both table and chair were separate sets of tools on long cables like dentist’s drills, but Sammi also saw a shelf full of metal instruments. Racks of towels sat on shelves, and there were containers both for hazardous waste and for needles, as if they’d come to give blood.

  The tools of the tattooist were on top of rolling cabinets whose drawers, she imagined, were filled with different inks. Sammi couldn’t look too long at the instruments without feeling a little faint. She glanced away and caught Dante studying her curiously.

  “Now,” the tattooist said, “are you all going to have the same color, or different? And if it’s the same, do you want black or something more vivid?”

  His accent made the question sound exotic. The girls exchanged silent looks.

  “Black is bold,” Caryn said. “If it’s just going to be one color, black makes a statement.”

  T.Q. and Katsuko nodded. Sammi gnawed her lower lip. When Letty glanced at her, she smiled, a mask she put on to hide the turmoil inside her.

  “Black it is,” Letty said. “Where do you want me, on the table or in the chair?”

  Dante spread his hands open. “Where am I going to be working?”

  Sammi arched an eyebrow, wondering how daring her friends might be, or how secretive. If she herself was going to go ahead with this, there were very few places she could imagine hiding from her parents. The tattoo might go on one of her breasts, or on her lower abdomen, low enough that even her lowest-waisted jeans would not reveal it. Either way, she would have to bare part of herself to Dante that she would hide from almost anyone else.

  The thrill of the forbidden tingled through her, now joined by a rush of embarrassment.

  “The base of my back,” Letty said, reaching around to show exactly where. It occurred to Sammi how fortunate Letty was that her parents would be okay with the tattoo. After she’d come out as a lesbian, a small, tasteful tattoo would probably get barely a blink.

  “You want your friends to step out?”

  Letty shook her head. She ran her tongue over her lips, revealing a nervousness that surprised Sammi.

  “All right,” Dante said, as he made his way over to the table and began to spread clean towels over it. “You can leave your shirt and panties on. Lie on your stomach on the table, and we’ll get started. Let me just get the design. I left it up front.”

  The tattooist hurried out, and the girls all exhaled as if they’d been holding one enormous breath. They smiled, a bit uncertainly, but then Letty slipped out of her skirt. She climbed onto the table and lay down on her stomach, as though she expected Dante to give her a massage.

  “You know, we didn’t even ask how much,” Letty said.

  As she spoke, Dante reentered the room with the design in one hand. “It’s all one color, and the design isn’t very complex. Unless one of you wants it really big, I’ll charge you seventy-five apiece. Call it a group rate.”

  None of them replied. They had agreed to bring a hundred bucks apiece, not sure what the cost would be. Sammi thought of the things she could do with seventy-five dollars.

  Dante folded Letty’s shirt up to just below her bra strap, then slid down her panties a few inches to prepare the space for her tattoo.

  “In some
tribal cultures, tattoos used to be hand carved,” Dante said as he went to the sink and washed his hands with water so hot it steamed, even with the warmth in the room. “They would cut the design in, then rub pigments or dyes, sometimes ashes, into the wounds. Some people still do it that way, believe it or not. Barbaric, I think. I’m an artist. I prefer not to use my art to serve some bizarre fetish. Cutting flesh is for surgeons.”

  He pulled on a pair of latex gloves. “No latex allergies? Good.”

  At Letty’s side, he squirted a brownish liquid onto her lower back and then began to spread it with his fingers, rubbing it in, covering the entire area. “This is a combination of disinfectant and topical anesthetic. It helps dull the pain.”

  At the mention of pain, all the girls seemed to pause. Letty, however, seemed perfectly comfortable.

  “In Japan, they sometimes use sharpened bamboo needles and create the tattoos by hand, moving slowly, inserting one needle at a time. I respect the discipline of irezumi, but I’m not that patient.” He smiled. “Also, I don’t believe art has to ignore technology. With the machine, the needles puncture the skin a hundred times a second or so.”

  Sammi arched her eyebrows. “And, oddly enough, that doesn’t comfort me.”

  Dante nodded. “I see you’re nervous. You don’t need to be. It stings, sure, but I promise that you have been hurt more than I will hurt you tonight.”

  Having once tripped over a board studded with bent and half-rusted nails, Sammi still didn’t feel reassured.

  “Can we stop talking about the pain and the needles?” Letty called out from the table. “I’m trying to stay in my happy place here, and you’re all making it very difficult.”

  Dante went to a small silver machine and flicked a switch. It hummed almost like a microwave, and when he turned it off and opened the door, steam billowed out.

  “Every one I use will be sterile,” he said. “Even so, you’ll have to care for the tattoos properly afterward, to avoid infection.”