Tattoo-1

"Give me something to take my mind off this fucking pain," she demanded just 4 minutes after getting touched by the needle. This was definitely going down in my book as a new low.
"I could have numbed your skin if you asked earlier, its too late for that now. Ink and blood don't get along very well." I lied. Tattoo ink settles in dermis, anaesthetic gets injected into vein, the two separated by a layer of fat which is thick enough to make mixing impossible. It was just that syringes gave me creeps. My so called friends never hesitated to point out the irony.
My reply was not a very reassuring one and her eyes were almost replete with tears by this time. I switched on the music player, thinking it might help. 'I am a man of constant sorrow....' echoed in the room. I didn't know if it helped or depressed her. Secretly I wished for latter, I hated pussies who hadn't even grown a pube yet, creeping into my parlor, demanding the most intricate designs, which required patience and thoroughness. I would have asked her to fuck off from my parlor but her skin was too good a canvas to reject. No blemishes, no scars, not a single hair tarnished her back. She was still wincing, biting her lips, muffling the cry that was building up in her throat, wriggling the smallest of her toes that I thought could never be wriggled. Her fidgeting meant that sooner or later I was going to spoil this beautiful canvas.
So burying all my wont, I decided to converse, asking silly questions that ranged from personal to mundane. Her words were mostly mechanical, but it took her mind off the tattoo. Little by little her fidgeting subsided. She was getting comfortable in that couch, or atleast as comfortable as she could get with a needle slashing her. Tears had dried up in her eyes and our gaze was locked for a long time, and it seemed that she was one of those people who talked more with their eyes than their mouths, her eyes would sparkle when I asked something that was close to her heart and would dim when the question was mundane. Before long I even realized that they were changing colors, from black to auburn, then slowly from auburn to grey and finally her iris disappeared into the eye white. I wanted to slap myself to confirm what I was seeing, but my hands weren't moving, I could sense the needle stuck in her upper left back, drilling down her skin. Although I couldn't see but I felt warm blood kissing my fingers. Soon the needle would strike an artery and blood would gush to the height of the ceiling, but the seemingly vulnerable bitch who couldn't bear the needle for 4 minutes wasn't even wincing. In fact there was a thin smirk settling on her almost non-existent lips. No matter how hard I tried to move my head and my limbs, they won't budge. My head was ringing, drool dribbled down the corner of my mouth, I thought as if I was having a stroke. Eventually I pissed myself, I fell from the chair and my body contracted to an embryonic hug on the floor. I could see the bitch leaving the couch, flashing a despicable grin towards my helpless body. I thought she was going to kick me in the ribs or in the face, but she turned and walked towards the door. A shifting gleam in the back pocket of her jean caught my eye. It was from a scalpel that she was so prominently visible and yet my eyes missed it. Dumb fucking eyes, causing me so much trouble today. I was going to teach them a lesson if I somehow came out of this ordeal alive. And chances of it were already slimming with every passing second. When she switched on the close sign and notched up the volume of the music player, last of the piss in my bladder also gave away. Increasing the volume was a useless gesture. No one gave the shrieks from tattoo parlors a second thought. But finding 'sit down by the fire' reverbrating through my bones during my last moments was somehow comforting. I closed my eyes and let the unconsciousness drape me in her hug.

Tattoo-2

I was not exactly sure for how long did I pass out. There were many moments when I thought I had regained consciousness, but every time I found myself in prone position, that cold dusty floor of my parlor kissing my cheek, its dust clogging my nostrils. Every time I felt a burden on my lower back, which I tried to shake off unavailingly. Whenever I squinted, the bitch was there, resting on my back, moving the scalpel effortlessly, and I would pass out again. This happened for quite a long time, so long that I found these occasional wakings as irritants in my blissful nightmare. In fact when I finally woke up, I wished that I faint again. When no unconsciousness greeted me for a long time, I decided to take stock of  the situation.

The room I was lying in was full of boxes, with barely enough space in the aisle to accommodate me. I reckoned that she must have dragged me to supply room; no difficult feat; I hardly weighed 120 lbs. In the clock six hours had passed, although I wasn't sure whether it was same day or another, and my back felt as if someone took a red hot brand and instead of burning a spot, rubbed it all over. But in that bedlam, the thing I remembered most clearly was the blood. The floor of my place was crooked, so most of the blood had escaped the supply room and settled towards the studio wall. The fact that I was still alive meant that blood loss had not been substantial, but the way it had spread on the floor seemed to suggest otherwise. A fresh wave of nausea swept me over, this one not for the loss of blood, but its sight. Even more repulsive were her impudent footprints jutting out in coagulated blood. The studio wall towards which blood had spread displayed my designs. It seemed that when the bitch got tired of slashing me, she took a break and decided to give my designs a closer look.

That was what drew the final straw. I had had enough of  being treated like a half dead animal. Spurred by my own helplessness or some subconscious defiance for her, I prised myself up too quickly, but regretted the decision immediately. It felt like I had been slammed Back first onto a pile of discarded syringes. Gritting my teeth, I took some staggering steps towards a door frame that connected my supply room to the studio. After an eternity and a half; when my body stopped shaking, I dragged myself to the studio mirror to check how deeply the bitch had chiseled my back.

What greeted me in the mirror were not the zig-zag random cuts slashed across my back, but a well formed shape. She had carved a spider like creature on my back, and it seemed that it was not a hush hush job. She took her sweet little time to first draw an outline, a significantly deep one. The skin is much tougher than what people think it is. Wade through 1.5mm of epidermis and you get a 3mm layer of dermis, wade a bit further and you get that much derided fat. Most lacerations barely graze the dermis. The deep ones can reach up to fat cells and need a stitch later, but they too stop bleeding after a hour or so, cut through that precious precious little layer of yellow fat, and the wound will keep bleeding till a day or so, and if you don't die of blood loss, you will probably die of infection. Apparently that was the layer she had played with, and that was the day I realized that being skinny wasn't probably such a good thing.

How she made that shape with a scalpel still eludes me (light saber seems more plausible choice), but even in all that bloodiness, the shape retained its distinctiveness. The shape that somehow reminded me spiderman's logo had its head starting on my nape, and some eight legs coming out of its bloated body. A couple of tentacles were touching my shoulder blades, next two touching the armpits, another couple on the opposite side of my waist and last two touching the base of my spine.
Rest of the work was ungainly, she sucked badly at filling her outline, there were shades of red and blue inside her spider, and a bunch of black clots of dry blood every here and there. Still poorer was her attempt to stitch the wound. Cutting was hard, stitching it back was even harder. The wound was full of rudimentary half done stitches, some of them hardly a milimeter apart and some separated by inches. Ham-fisted retards could have done a better job. All jokes into the gutter, I had a problem to take care of and time was little, the more I waited, the more tired I grew, and if I gave into the temptation of resting there, I would have never made out alive.

Tattoo-3

The next two months that I spent recovering, were like a syrupy drop, just hanging at the mouth of the bottle, priming itself to fall, but not entirely sure of the decision. There was booze, there was opium, and there were some hallucinations which I mistook for real thoughts. My sister was taking care of me, which more or less meant that I had food whenever I wanted it. It also meant that I had to deal with a disgusted look on her face and her entreating tirades when I wasn't high. While I was dumbing my brain down, my body was handling the trauma surprisingly well. Being a tattooist, I had lectured several of my clients, about how tattoo was a wound, how the immune system will treat it as an outsider, how it will be covered with clot in a week and how they had to deal with the temptation of peeling the scab off.

And now there I was, watching the same kind of slow healing as if it was a miracle in making. Barring a few more stitches administered by a friend, the design was untouched. The friend also gave me a few balls of charas to wade through the recovery. They lasted a week, then I took to booze. One crutch down, another crutch up.

Every time I was sober enough, I would ask my sister to hold a mirror behind my back, and I would observe the wound in dressing mirror. It became some kind of medication for me. I could stare at it for hours, hell I could even feel that subtle recuperation happening under my skin. Cells savaging pathogens savaging cells. So slow, yet my fucked up immune system still managed to close the wound in five days, another two to get rid of that mishmash of stitches, and still I could feel my cells working incessantly under the scar tissue. My sister had a new role now, much to her chagrin, I would ask her to trace the scar tissue using a sharp pencil. That pricking used to soothe me. Since that tissue was still soft, almost like baby skin, it would puncture and bleed. And surprisingly it soothed more than it hurt, as if it liked to be fed on the blood.

This obsession had led my sister believe that all this shit was my own doing. Already she had a tough time believing that some girl would come within a touching distance of a hygienically retarded person like me. Every now and then she would ask me if it was some kind of sick experiment I agreed to be a part of. I told her it was. A slap and a lecture later, I was kicked out, luckily healed enough to be on my own. If I hadn't been kicked, I guess my lazy ass would have sprouted roots in her place, content in being taken care for like a toddler.