After Matt placed the tracing, the first prick of the needle dragged across my skin. He bent, concentrated on the work, and I resisted the urge to run my fingers along the stubble of his shaved head.
“Where’d you buy your tattoo gun?” I asked.
“Don’t call it a gun.” His voice was stern, the way he emphasized the word gun.
“Yeah,” Frankie said. She rubbed her hands on the couch, read-justed her body a bit. She’d been so quiet I almost forgot she was there. “The word gun makes it sound like tattooing is somehow violent.”
“Isn’t it?” I asked. “Violent, I mean.” Matt stretched the skin tight. As he moved up toward the spot where my hip and thigh met, the rawness set in. I felt the skin taut between his fingers, the latex-covered index and thumb of his left hand, the needles in between that skin space.
“Tattooing is an art,” he said. “Not marksmanship.”
Matt removed the needles for a moment and looked up at me, one eyebrow raised. My skin prickled a little, out of fear or nervousness, or because I was cold and half-naked in someone’s chair.
“Guns destroy,” he said. “This creates.”
He took the damp cloth with the hospital soap smell and wiped off the extra ink. I asked Frankie for my beer and took a swig. I imagined my fingers running across the raised skin, the new scar Matt was creating. When he moved his hands toward my hips, the tattoo burned a sudden hot I couldn’t stand. All the crevices of my body sweated as I took another drink of beer. I felt the cold and fizz on my tongue, my damp armpits, and the burn of the alcohol at the back of my mouth.
In pain all senses are heightened. The mind has to go deeper than the immediate to be okay. Pain is a form of meditation that defeats the now. It is not about being present with the pain but being beyond it, being able to breathe and function and think, being able to survive without kicking and screaming.
Matt put the needles back on my skin. I rolled my head back against the chair and raised my arms above my head. I tried to keep my legs relaxed. Every now and then, his hand rested on part of my thigh.
“Do you like tattoo sex?” Matt asked.
“What?” I said.
“Do you like tattoo sex?”
I wondered if he was going to fuck me and tattoo me at the same time. Maybe they were into weird shit like that. Matt’s head was down, eyes on the tattoo as he spoke.
“Tattoo sex is when the needle goes in and out,” he said. “When the pain feels so good you could come.”
I breathed in the skin of my thigh stretched between his forefinger and thumb, breathed in between swigs of warm beer and the pain shooting up from my pelvis. I breathed in between Frankie on the couch, the way she watched over her kingdom, and Matt on the floor. His shoulder bones moved back and forth underneath his shirt, widening and unwidening like the muscles of some large beast.
“Do you like pain?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “But I bet you do.”
I looked over at Frankie and she smiled.
HOPELESS / ROMANTIC
THE BUZZING WAS IN my head. It was in my bones, my thigh bone, my hips. It was in the chair, threading up my spine. It stayed within me long after he was finally done. Matt wiped away the last of the stray ink with a paper towel. The hospital smell stung my skin and nose. Frankie went back to their bedroom to grab a full-length body mirror. As I stood up and turned around, I knew Matt would see the tattoos on the back of my thighs. He grabbed my hip first, pushing me against the back of the chair, the latex from his glove pulling my skin in a way that hurt. I was a little drunk from the beer but I surrendered in part because my body dissolved again when he touched me. My laugh sounded strange to me, like it was a sound that did not belong to my teeth and tongue once it left my mouth.
“Whoa,” he said. “Hang on a sec.”
I placed my hands on the back of the chair and straightened my arms, bending over. Matt yelled into the bedroom for Frankie, grabbing my thigh the same way he grabbed my hip, firm. He rubbed the tattoo a little, as if he could feel the ink scars underneath the latex glove. I remembered getting them done, lying on my belly with my arms curled underneath me as the artist worked, and then tracing my fingers over each of the new letters, the ridge of scarring raised gently on the skin.
“Coming!” Frankie yelled back. She lugged a full-length mirror down the hall, my reflection bouncing back and forth in it as she got to the living room. She placed it upright against the couch and let out a heavy breath.
“Okay,” she said. “Time to see your new tattoo!” She walked over and stood next to Matt.
“Look at these,” he said, motioning to my thighs, the words on them.
hopeless / romantic
I blushed and was suddenly aware of the open air all over my almost naked body. The tattoo itself was more like a wish. I didn’t feel connected to anyone in a romantic way, and most of the time sex felt like a stand-in for whatever romance was supposed to be.
When I’d slept with Sam, my manager, I felt detached from the sex even though I harbored a deep longing for his attention. He
