30. THE Wristwatch Tattoo
Valentine filmed his challenges, so an entire crowd was crammed into the Rogue Unicorn's larger tattooing room. Valentine was in a wheelchair, attended by a nervous-looking, nurse-for-hire type. There were two cameramen and a pair of associated busybodies. And, inside the magic circle that prevented stray mana from infiltrating the design, were my tools, my chair, Alex and me-and a stool with a box containing extra paraphernalia I would use later.
We had started early Friday morning at the ungodly hour of nine, as I had lied and told them it could take up to six hours-even before I knew an hour would be eaten just getting Valentine's wheelchair up the stairs. When you got over the intricacy of the linework, however, the watch was bone-simple to ink and I would be done in three hours, maybe even two.
I'd stayed up late through the night mixing pigments, performing the rituals to purify them, and generally setting up. In that regard, the watch was simple: it used only seven pigments. Some of the magical tattoos I've done have used upwards of fifty.
So… pigments are simple, if a bit repetitive. The hardest part? Preparing the needles. Normal tattoos are done with little needles soldered to the end of a bar that goes into the tattooing machine. Magical tattoos require something a bit… different. Something that will soak up magic and release it on cue, not poison it like iron does. There are crystals that will work and even some new plastic composites from Japan, but the best material is unicorn hornpreferably free-shed, gathered, if not by virgins, by someone wearing blessed rubber gloves. Yes, Virginia, unicorns do exist. But that's a story for another day.
Making the horn into needles takes many of the same tools that a modelmaker needs-magnifying glass and tweezers, files and sandpaper-and I did my needlework myself, which accounted for at least half of the quality of my work. It had taken two and a half hours to chip all the fragments I needed and file them into all the filigreed 'points' needed to ink the design-a one point, a triangular three, a curved five, and even a comblike seven for some of the larger outlines. You can't solder the finished points: you have to glue them into a throwaway prong and clamp them. I tried reusable clamps once and it was a total wash-running them through the autoclave loosened the clamp, so the horn came loose in the client's skin and he nearly ended up with a magical infection. Trust me-you don't want one of those.
With the needles in the autoclave, the next step is the flashprinted on transfer paper so it can be copied to the skin. With an ordinary tattoo, a stencil and eyeballing it are enough, but for a magical design, you have to be more careful; Jinx had given me a list of resonant points, and once I began working on Alex's skin I'd be pulling out a ruler and calipers to make sure the design was right. It can be tricky work-skin does shift and stretch, after all- and it would be a bit trickier since the design was reversed.
But now I had my ink and my needles and my flash and my subjects. All was in readiness-all that remained was to make sure that everyone understood this was my stage and my chair, and that inking a magic tattoo was not a stunt.
'I still don't see why we had to come to you' Alex said, fidgeting in my tattooing chair. 'Why couldn't you have brought your equipment to the hospital?'
'First, I need a sterile environment,' I said, wiping down his hand. He jumped a little when I did it: I've had a lot of men in this chair and I know the signs when they're stalling for time. 'You understand sterile, right? Hospitals are dirty. That's how the old man got a staph infection-'
'Luck of the draw. All hospitals,' Valentine said from his wheelchair, 'put patients at risk for staph infections. They're filled with diseased people in a confined space constantly being exposed to each other's air, blood and fluids. Emory is one of the finest. Cleaner than most.'
'See?' Alex said, still squirming a little. 'We could have made arrangements-'
'If James Randi can go on national television on a gurney when he was on morphine,' Valentine said, nostrils flaring, 'I can survive a few hours in a wheelchair on Tylenol-3.'
'So, first, a few ground rules,' I said to the lead cameraman. 'Hey you, behind the lens.'
'I'm the director,' a second man said imperiously, stepping forward.
'No, I'm the director in here,' I snapped, holding my eyes on him. 'I'm putting a permanent magical mark on a human body, which I take very seriously whether you get it or not. I'll try to make it easy on you to get a good shot, but when I'm working, the camera works around me and not the other way around. If I say slide, you slide. Savvy?'
He held up his hands. 'We got it.'
'Same goes for you, old man,' I said to Valentine. 'This isn't a stage magic trick you get to expose. You pull some James Randi shit and leap up to start sprinkling Styrofoam chips on me when I'm working, I tattoo you a new working asshole in the middle of your forehead.'
Valentine blinked, then his brow furrowed. 'Sure, but we'll have to test-'
'The test is that the tattoo will move when it's done,' I said. 'Normal tattoos don't do that, do they? They're just pigment plaques in the dermis. How could a tattoo move?'
Valentine's mouth just hung open. 'Uh… '
'I have never done this particular design before, so as an extra bit of insurance, we're going to do this in two stages,' I said. 'First, I will ink it on myself and make sure it works-'
'Didn't you have a graphomancer review it?' Valentine asked.
'Did I leap up on stage in the middle of your performance at the Masquerade?' I said, smiling at him. 'Give me an allowance for theatrics here. To win this challenge, I need to make it absolutely clear that the tattoo works by magic, and since Alex is not a skindancer, I'm going to tattoo it on myself first and show you. Then, and only then, I'll put the design on Alex.'
'Then why'd you wipe down my hand?' Alex asked.
'You're pretty, and I wanted to touch your warm skin.' I watched him squirm. 'Do I need an another excuse? But seriously, don't go rubbing your hand in mud or anything. It was just convenient for me to pre-prep you; the reasons will become clear later.'
Valentine leaned forward. 'Isn't it unusual for a tattooist to.. . tattoo themselves?'
'Very unusual,' I said, 'for normal tattoo artists. For magical inkers, it's practically required. Magical marks can go bad, and when they go bad they can actually kill you or mess you up for life. In the old days, inkers sometimes did that to each other deliberately, leaving their magical competition jinxed. Historically, there's not a lot of trust between magical inkers.'
'Charming,' Alex said.
'That was the old school, this is the new one,' I said, pouring encircling mix into my hand. 'I do my work with ethical pride, employing expert graphomancers, and with state licenses, at least in Georgia, California and New York. You have nothing to worry about.'
'What is that?' Valentine said, staring suspiciously at the sparkling dust.
'A mix of kosher salt, quartz granules, cinnamon and ginger,' I said, 'with a little plain old glitter thrown in for visibility. Nothing special-unless you happen to believe in magic.'
I said a little prayer over my cupped hands. Someone like Jinx would probably go in with a bunch of Wiccan nonsense about protection from this and invocation of that. I don't believe in all of that stuff. There are spiritual forces of evil in this world, just waiting to take residence in anything even remotely magical, and the 'circle'a blessed ring of crystals layered over a flat plane, preferably of living earth but in this case a disc of cut granite set into the floor-did help to keep them out. But you didn't need elaborate rituals: you just needed to look within, to whatever spiritual force you believed in, and call on it, letting your own aura blossom forth and charge the crystals to life.
My prayer finished, I poured the mix into the circle around us, murmuring. As the circle closed, I could feel our auras mingle with the mana built up in the pigments as a tingling rippled through my tattoos, something I'd never felt when I was unmarked. Some lucky people could feel mana anyway-Alex squirmed in his chair, the nurse looked at us eagerly, and the director with antsy concern. Valentine and the cameraman remained unmoved.
'We're now encircled. This ring will help repel any stray magic or 'evil spirits',' I said, putting my hands up in scare quotes. 'Or whatever. Regardless, this is a part of the procedure. No one crosses this line. Not for any reason. Clear?'
When they nodded assent, I began wiping off my left wrist with alcohol, then soap. 'Stage two in inking a magical mark is imprinting the design.' I picked up the acetate sheet of the flash. A thin stick of blessed pitch
