Ink is Thicker Than Water (Entangled Teen)

by Spalding, Amy

  “That’s not me, though,” I say, which is kind of silly because even though things are fine, it isn’t like I’m suddenly never going to argue with Mom again. It feels good to say, though, and from Mom’s expression it probably feels good to hear.

  “Girls, I’m really sorry, but I’ve actually got two back-to-back appointments starting any minute. After that I’m probably free so—”

  “We know,” Sara says.

  “We’re your back-to-back appointments!” I shout, even though I promised Sara she could say this part. Sometimes I worry my emotional age isn’t that far ahead of Finn’s.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard ’em.” Russell carries over the design we’d requested. “Here you go, Mel.”

  “But!” Mom stares at us, her blue eyes wide. It’s such a Finn expression I giggle. “Is this a joke?”

  “We really want to do this,” Sara says. “We did some research on family coats of arms. And we gave Russell the Brooks and Stone ones, and he combined them so—”

  “Stone,” Mom says. “Our name, really? Not—”

  “We thought about your maiden name,” I say. “But Stone’s the name you picked, and it’s Russell’s name, and Finn’s name, too. So—”

  Mom bursts into crazy tears, and I throw my arms around her to calm her down. (Of course she just cries more.) “You two are serious about this?”

  “Like the plague.” I worry the design will get crushed in the mayhem, so I hand it off to Sara. “So come on. You’re eating into our appointment time.”

  She laughs as she wipes away her tears. “You’re not even eighteen, young lady.”

  “Russell’ll sign for me. Come on.”

  “Who’s going first?”

  “Kellie.” Sara shoves me toward Mom. “Right?”

  “I guess I have to.” Up until now I haven’t really fully considered I’ll be actually getting a tattoo today. I’ve only seen a million, but this is going to be mine, and therefore is going to hurt me.

  “Where are you getting it?” Mom asks, and I also realize I haven’t considered that much yet, either. But my bicep seems a good choice. Lots of people can see it, but I can keep it hidden when I need to, and also it isn’t one of those stereotypical girl places to get inked. I’m not starting off with that.

  Mom rolls up my sleeve, cleans off my skin, and presses on the transfer design, just like I’ve seen her do a million other times for a million other people. She tells me to walk to the full-length mirror so I can decide if I like the placement or not (I do, and Sara and Russell approve, too). The Brooks coat of arms is topped with a little lion, while the Stone one has a lamb, so it is totally like destiny knew we’d do this one day and got Mom and Russell together accordingly. Russell designed the animals to face each other, which is like the cutest thing ever obviously, but he did it in a way where it doesn’t look cutesy. Within the shield part, he combined the funky little turrets of the Brooks shield (Sara promises me it doesn’t necessarily mean we were historically warmongers or something awful) with the eagle and flowers of the Stone one without making it look crowded or messy or ill-planned.

  It is seriously good we’re family because there’s no way Sara and I could afford artists of Mom’s and Russell’s caliber otherwise.

  “This is so funny.” Mom lines up little tubs to hold the different color inks, securing them in place on the Saran-Wrapped counter with Vaseline. “I guess I thought I’d give you a tattoo someday, but never so soon.”

  “You have to tell me exactly how much it hurts,” Sara says to me.

  “I don’t think it works that way,” I say.

  “The pain’s part of the process,” Mom says. “Don’t you want to feel like you earned it?”

  I don’t know about that, but all of a sudden the tattoo machine is buzzing, and Mom is moving it in my direction. It’s a lot louder when it’s coming right at you.

  “I’m just going to do a tiny bit,” Mom says. “So you’ll be prepared. Okay?”

  I nod.

  “Breathe out, Kell-belle.”

  I do, and the tattoo machine is on my skin for just a second. It is sort of like a very direct bee sting, maybe not even that bad, though one you can’t slap away. “I thought it’d be a lot worse.”

  “It isn’t that bad,” she says. “Also, you’re a tough one.”

  “Also, that’s not really a painful place to get one,” Russell calls, but I decide to ignore him and dwell on being tough instead. I watch my reflection in the mirror as Mom slowly does the outline.

  “This is such a milestone,” Mom says. “My first tattoo changed my life.”

  “How did you know?” I ask, because even though I’ve heard the bluebird story a million times, until now I’ve never really thought about what led up to it, only what came after.

  “It’s hard to explain. I just did. All of mine, I knew. Even my tree, which took the most planning—” She gestures like I won’t know what she’s talking about, when the magnolia tree, inked by Russell, growing up the length of her inner left forearm isn’t exactly easy to miss. Russell sports a matching one inked by Mom, as they’d gotten them in between their wedding and honeymoon. “I just knew this is what I wanted. I’m definitely more me than without.”

  I try to imagine Mom without her ink, and my mind grinds to a stop. “Well, yeah.”

  The outline’s finished, so she switches off to coloring in the tattoo. The shading hurts way less than the outline—it’s a fatter needle—and it goes just as fast as I’ve seen hundreds of times for other people.

  “Okay, baby, I think we’re finished.” Mom wipes the tattoo a few times, cleaning off the excess ink and blood. I can see in the lighter spots that it’s still bleeding, but not really that much. And who can’t feel like a bad-ass with a still-bleeding tattoo? “Go look in the mirror. Sara, I’m getting a soda, and then you’re all mine.”

  I walk over to the mirror, examining my newly inked arm. “It looks good, right?”

  “It does,” Sara says. “Russell, you did a really good job with the design.”

  “Thanks.” He nods toward Mom in the back room. “This is a really good thing you girls are doing.”

  “We just wanted cool tattoos,” I say, which makes him laugh.

  “Right.” He looks from Sara to me. “Good to have you both back.”

  Mom rushes out with a Diet Coke and her camera. “Russell, take a picture of Kellie’s arm for me, would you?”

  “Of course.” Russell takes the camera from Mom and zooms in on my tattoo. “You know they’re addictive, right?”

  “All the customers say so. I don’t know what I’ll want as badly as this one, though.”

  “You did start off pretty big,” he says, while Mom is getting to work placing the design on Sara’s ankle. I knew she’d go with one of those girl spots. I guess for Sara it is still pretty bad-ass. “Good to see her like this, isn’t it?”

  “Both of them,” I say. “Seriously, Russell, I’m sorry I was such a jerk.”

  “We’re all jerks sometimes,” he says. “Don’t make it more than it is. I gave my parents way more hell. Crossing my fingers Finn’s like you two and not me.”

  “Me, too.” I laugh and walk over to Mom’s station where Sara is grimacing as Mom inks the outline. “It didn’t hurt that much.”

  “Ankles are worse, Kell-belle,” Mom says. “Be nice.”

  “Are you free after this, Mom?” Sara asks. “We could get dinner.”

  “Kellie would have more of an idea than I do. Do you know what a great job she does helping us run the shop?”

  “I’m not surprised,” Sara says as I walk over to check Mom’s schedule. The spot is wide open so I ink in, Dinner with my newly tattooed daughters! “Kellie’s really good at keeping everything together.”

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to my agent, Kate Schafer Testerman, for signing me many billions of years ago based off of this book and believing in it for the same reasons I did.<
br />
  Thank you to my editor Stacy Cantor Abrams for helping me whip this sucker into shape. The heavy lifting and the tears were worth it! Lots of thanks to Alycia Tornetta for being truly one of the most helpful people I’ve ever worked with.

  I am sure I never would have completed this book without the help and encouragement of friend, critique partner, and generally cool person Meghan Deans. So, you know, thank you for that.

  Thanks to all the early readers and supporters. Ink was technically my first book, regardless of publication schedule, and letting others into my fictional world was a new and scary thing for me. So thank you to Andrea Robinson-DiNardo, Liz Kies, and Lindsay Ribar. And thank you to critique partners who helped more recently: Sarah Skilton, Christie Baugher, Maurene Goo, Brandy Colbert.

  A huge thanks goes to Kevin Fanning for (correctly) correcting me on Kellie’s favorite album by The Beatles. Thanks to Scott Singer, who has a PhD in physics, for telling me what a person might do with a PhD in physics. Thanks to my St. Louis crew for help with the research that was hard to do from long-distance: Jessica Hutchins, Stephanie Myles, David Sullins.

  Thanks to my incredibly talented cover photographer and designer Jessie Weinberg, and to model Kristen Williams. Thanks also to Mike Erwin for designing the cover’s tattoo.

  Thank you to every tattoo artist who’s inked me.

  And, lastly, thanks to my parents for their constant support, for playing the oldies station so much in the car when I was little, and for having (almost) as cool a family business while I was in high school as The Family Ink.

  Don’t miss Amy Spalding’s first novel

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  She likes strong coffee and bourbon.

  She’s my mother.

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