Tattoos

by Andrew Graham Martin

Haberdoedas

Sometimes, when Mike lifts his arm to grab something, I see her. She’s there on his forearm, wreathed in a golden banner which reads “JASMINE” in a sans serif font. Her hair is a choppy sea and she has a mole on the right of her hip.

One night as Mike sleeps I try whispering to her.

“Is your name actually Jasmine?”

There’s a long, harrowing pause before she answers.

“…Are you actually a skeleton?”

My body shivers like a tuning fork. I consider my response carefully.

“…I just think of myself as me.”

“Well. Me too.”

Mike snorts and rolls over, startling us into silence.

We begin to speak more often after this. Under the hiss of water in the shower or as he blasts his death metal in the garage. The color of her lipstick is called “Merlot.” She has six toes on her left foot. She can touch her heel to her ear if Mike pinches his skin folds in the exact right way.

She predates me. Mike had her done in the likeness of his current girlfriend, whose name I’ve learned adorns her banner.

I arrived later, on a drunken whim in New Orleans, from a flash sheet at a shop with bleached shark jaws lining the walls.

I tell her it hurt coming into being. She calls me a little bitch. I shrink, positive this will be the end of our interactions.

But that night she slides all the way up to Mike’s shoulder to lie beside me. She asks if I remember what it was like being ink in vials.

I say claustrophobic.

“Really?” she says. “I’ve never felt freer. Back then, I could’ve been anything. Now, I’ve come together and have to be something.”

She sleeps with her head on my shoulder. We all smell like Mike — Irish Springs body wash and cigarette smoke — but she makes it good, somehow.

One year later, Mike notices in the mirror a little devil baby has appeared on his clavicle. He assumes he got it while blacked out in Amsterdam. I hear him tell his mom he’s going to quit drinking.

Jasmine has new bags under her eyes. So do I. The skin that makes us has grown soft, pale, wrinkled.

I can’t make her laugh anymore. But the baby can. Maybe that’s enough?

It snows, it gets hot.

Then one morning I hear Mike tell his mom Jasmine has dumped him. He cries into a snickerdoodle, crumbs snowflaking into his beard.

His mother cracks open a Mason jar and dumps a wad of cash onto the table.

“For tattoo removal,” she says.

I suffocate into her soft, freckly shoulder as they embrace.

We discuss sending Jasmine to hide on the sole of his foot or under his hairline. But how then would she ever see Devil, she asks? Or me?

I don’t have answers.

We decide — she decides — a life spent in hiding isn’t a life. Something has to come after removal, she says. She’s ready to find out what.

I hate her for the decision, but I can’t spend our last day together hating her, so I spend it playing hide and seek with her and Devil across Mike’s back. We watch the sun come down through his car window. It blasts gold and orange against us, flickering in leaves. That night she sleeps with her head against my shoulder.

When I wake up, she’s gone.

I choose to believe she’s all potential again.

I choose to believe I am too.

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Andrew Graham Martin’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Post Road, SmokeLong Quarterly, X-R-A-Y, Okay Donkey, Cleaver, and elsewhere. He lives in Indianapolis.