“So that explains the obsessive texting all the time!” I laughed. “I thought it was a new girlfriend.”
“A new girlfriend?” he said with a smile as he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me tightly against him. “Why would I want a new girlfriend when I’ve got all I ever wanted right here in my arms?”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
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SEXY TATTOOIST
By Claire Adams
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 Claire Adams
Chapter One
Graham
“A rose.” The girl gestured vaguely to her tanned, freckled cleavage, of which there was plenty. “Right here.”
I tried not to roll my eyes, which was generally a frowned upon reaction when a customer was telling you what they wanted you to tattoo on their body.
“Okay,” I nodded, and tried to arrange my features into an expression that suggested I thought getting a rose tattooed on her cleavage wasn’t a completely overdone and tired idea. Not that someone like her would care—I could tell her mind was made up about it, regardless of what anyone said.
“A red one with thorns,” she said after a moment. “You know, so it’s like symbolic of who I am … I have a hard exterior, but inside I’m like—”
“I know exactly what you mean.” It was 2 o’clock in the afternoon, but still way too early in the day for this kind of talk. “Give me a minute and let me sketch something up for you.”
“Great. I’m so excited to see how this will turn out.” She grinned, lines creasing the corners of her eyes. She wasn’t so much a girl as a woman who was still trying to be a girl, with her tight tank top and short shorts. She probably dedicated a considerable amount of time to working out, and it wouldn’t be long before she delved into the world of plastic surgery, if she hadn’t yet already. “You come highly recommended, you know,” she said, widening her eyes at me.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. You tattooed my best friend, Stephanie. She got a ... like a flower or something, half a flower, really. No, it was a lotus. I don’t totally remember, but it was here,” she gestured to her inner forearm, right below the wrist, “and you did it this special way, I forget what it’s called? Jab? Stab? No, not stab—”
“Stick and poke,” I said. “Or hand poked.” That nasal, high-pitched voice of hers was starting to shred my eardrums.
“That’s it! It was so beautiful. I might get something like that next time, but I’ve always wanted a rose, so I’m going with that first. But I really do like the idea of the stick and poke tattoos. It’s like, going back to the basics or something. That’s why Stephanie said she wanted one.”
My thighs were covered with the rudimentary stick and poke tattoos I’d been giving myself since I was a preteen, sitting in my small, shitty bedroom, my stepfather, Wade, taking up all the space in our small, shitty living room, watching TV in a haze of cigarette smoke, surround
ed by crushed PBR cans. I used a sewing needle, a chopstick, and some Bic ink and decorated my legs with all the things I wanted to say to Wade but couldn’t: Fuck off & die, Eat a dick, You are a cunt. Oh, I’d said a few things to him before, but that had always resulted in black eyes, broken ribs, a few concussions. The worst of it was when I was 10 and he hit me in the face with a two-by-four. It didn’t knock me out, but it left a spectacularly jagged scar right along my jawline, which I’ve since erased by growing a beard. The last fucking thing I wanted was a daily reminder of Wade’s existence every time I looked in the mirror.
It only took me a few minutes to sketch the rose exactly to this particular customer’s liking—so she said—and then she sat in the chair and I got to work. She kept up a steady stream of chatter that was easy enough to nod mindlessly to while tuning out at the same time. I felt a building sense of discontent, some sort of strange malaise, even though I knew how little sense that made. On Point Tattoo—my very own shop—was doing better than I ever could have imagined, and showing no signs of plateauing any time soon. I’d been doing so well, in fact, that eight months ago, I’d hired a second artist, an art school dropout named Helena with an uncanny ability to recreate, from memory, pretty much anything she saw in exacting, photographic detail. She was better than I was, though that wasn’t something I was willing to admit out loud. At least not yet. She probably knew it, but she hadn’t brought it up, and she didn’t seem like she was one of those people that needed to prove something about themselves. Besides, it would be good for business, which was what I told my buddy Todd when he started giving me shit about it.
“When I think of On Point, I think of you, Graham,” he’d said. “Not Helena. Which, by the way, is way too an exotic of a name for someone with as plain a face as she has.”
It was true: Helena was a plain Jane with spaghetti legs and no tits to speak of. She had brown hair she wore in a no-nonsense braid and had a penchant for wearing baggy skater shorts and white tank tops that only accentuated the fact that she was flat-chested. I guessed she was a lesbian, but we didn’t talk about our sex lives.
But this discontentedness, I’d say that started not long after Helena started working for me, though I didn’t think the two were related. No, it had more to do with the fact that I’d broken things off with Danielle, and that Danielle also happened to be a bit mentally unbalanced. That’s putting it nicely. She turned out to be a complete psycho. Not a dangerous one, but I hadn’t ruled out the possibility that her pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage were actually figments of her imagination. There was also the fact that we’d both discussed, at length, the fact that neither of us was really interested in being in a relationship and would prefer to keep things casual. At some point, she’d changed her mind, though she hadn’t bothered to let me know it.
Other than that, though, there was absolutely no reason for me to be feeling anything but satisfaction with the way things were working out in my life so far—successful business, fulfilling work, as much sex as I wanted. Women like tattoo artists, and women like beards. Even the women that you might peg as too straight-laced to get an actual tattoo themselves. There were a couple weeks this past winter—before Danielle—when I slept with a different woman every night for two weeks straight, culminating in a face slap when I accidentally called Hattie (Night 14) “Katie” (Night 2).