Tattoo Artist

         The man with dark hair and light green eyes quietly hummed to himself as he pulled out a new pair of latex gloves from a blue box sitting beside him. The song was by The Beatles, and his eyes flashed as he wistfully thought about the stories his mother had told him about how the world used to be.
         It wasn’t like this when I was young; let me tell you that, Donald. She would always start a story like that, shaking her head and running her hand through her dark brown hair. Why, when I was a child…
         Don sighed into the clean, white office. There was a stainless steel counter in front of him, and tattoo sketches filled the walls. ‘Another day, another dollar’ was a popular saying with his mother; she had a lot of them.
          He walked over to the door and opened it only to see a too-skinny girl with spiked purple hair waiting patiently. Her baggy shirt had some obscure band – the logo was a man shooting himself in the head. The hollows under her eyes were so dark they looked almost like bruises, but despite them she was attractive, even if she only made that by the skin of her teeth.
                He called it the lobby; the lights cast an orange glow that seemed strangely comforting. There were posters and tattoo ideas lining the walls and on the ceiling. The music was loud, obnoxious and annoying, and Don hated it but knew it was necessary. He looked down at his clipboard and saw the girl’s name was Cassidy. He nearly frowned – the elegance of the name didn’t fit with the coke fiend in front of him. But he caught himself and put on a warm, welcoming smile.
         “Cassidy Sinclair?”
         “Yeah,” she answered. She didn’t smile back. “That’s me.”
         “Follow me, please.”
         When she got up he saw she couldn’t have been more then ninety pounds. He waited until she was in the room with him, then shut the door quickly. As always, his head began to pound the moment she was in his office.
         “You can go sit down over there,” he said, gesturing towards the leather couch. “Would you like some water?”
         She nodded, sat down, and slowly began to swing her feet. Don went over to the sink and grabbed a glass that was sitting beside it.  When he glanced over his shoulder and saw that the girl was distracted, he quickly filled up the glass.
         “You can call me Don, by the way.” Don looked over his shoulder and tried to get her to smile. His head was hurting more by the minute. “So you wanted this on your ankle?”
                Don handed her the glass of water and went over to his desk, which looked more like it belonged in a doctor’s office then a tattoo parlor. Out of a drawer he pulled out a stencil of a rose, with the initials A.R.N below it. It was a beautiful picture, but his head began to pound harder and harder as he thought about how soon enough it wouldn’t be just a picture, soon enough it would be in her skin, which had once been pure and now was tainted and dirty…
         “Yeah, that’s the one.” She was sipping the water, watching him carefully through narrowed blue eyes.
         “Well then, let’s get started.” Don snapped on the gloves he had been carrying with him and opened a fresh package of needles.

         Don had finished stenciling in the picture when Cassidy finally spoke.
         “I noticed that you don’t seem to have any tattoos,” she said quietly, “that’s strange. You don’t see many tattoo artists without them.”
         Startled by this, Don glanced up. He noticed she had finished her glass of water, and he decided this was good. The pounding in his head lessened slightly.
         “I get asked that a lot, actually.” He admired his work for a moment, and went to get the needle. “I just think that tattoos should be meaningful, not something you get when you’re smashed. So far I haven’t found a tattoo that has… significance.”
         Cassidy’s eyes never left him, and he found the sharp, knowing look in them rather disconcerting. But he just smiled apologetically at her, then shrugged his shoulders as if to say ‘what can you do?’ and started up the needle.
         After about twenty minutes, Don tried to draw the girl into conversation, if only to distract her.
         “The design is really nice,” he said, the whirring of the needle digging into his head painfully, “did you draw it?”
         “I’m an illustrator for Techtonics Electronics.” She ruffled her spiky hair, not taking her eyes off the ceiling. “I draw all my own tattoos.”
         “How many do you have?”
         Cassidy paused, leaning back into the couch a little more. She seemed to think about it for a moment. “This will be my fifth. But it’s also the most important to me.”
         Don refrained from saying anything. He knew if she wanted to talk about it, she would.
         “I was always warned against getting a tattoo of someone’s name,” she continued after a moment of silence, “and I thought I would never, ever do it. In high school we joked about it all the time… and look at me now.
         “He was my fiancée. We were going to be married in a month…” she stopped abruptly. “He overdosed.”
         Don couldn’t think. The whirring of the needle seemed to have gotten louder, and now he could hear his mothers voice – it was yelling, telling him that he would never amount to anything, without her he was nothing and he would have been on the street, buying drugs and shooting up and selling himself and how would he have liked that… Don forcibly remembered the time he had gone down to the drug store to buy himself a chocolate bar, and maybe a soda. He had come back to the small apartment he and his mother shared and the moment he stepped through the door his mother had run over and punched him in the ear. Before he could fall down, though, she had punched him in the other ear. She was a tall, broad woman whose husband had taken the money and left as soon as the baby was born. Her punches had made his ears ring and his head hurt for hours. She had hugged him to her chest and said quietly, Go upstairs, Don, and read your bible, and try to understand what you have done wrong today.
                Don used to have an older brother, his mother told him later, who had been walking down the street, just going down to the store to buy himself a chocolate bar, and maybe a soda, when he had been shot and killed. The police had said it was a drive-by shooting, but his mother knew the real reason. It had been the druggies’ fault, the druggies who would try to get Don if he wasn’t careful. {iKevin is in a better place now but you don’t want to go there just yet do you? His mother had asked him wisely. So stay away from those people.  Don had gone upstairs and cried until his eyes were puffy and red and sore – then he had taken out his rosary and prayed for half an hour.
         He was still working, and doing a fine job, but he realized that something must have shown in his face - Cassidy was looking down at him and she was asking him if he was all right.
         “Yes,” Don said, quickly pulling himself together, “yes, I’m just fine.”
         That was the last thing they said to each other, and for the next hour Don had nothing to listen to but the whirring and the voices in his head.

         The tattoo was finished. It had taken only an hour and a half, and Don thought that it was his best work so far. The idea made him feel a little sick inside. It came out to one hundred and fifty dollars, and as Cassidy handed him the money she thanked him and gave him a small peck on the cheek, reaching up and touching his face with one hand.
         “Take care of yourself,” she whispered, and smiled into his eyes.
         When she turned around and walked out, closing the wooden door softly behind her, Don began to strip off his gloves and his smile grew and grew, revealing all of his teeth and looking more animal than human. She had no idea that he had slipped in the water a slow-acting poison, which would worm its way into her veins and slowly block off the blood supply to her heart.
         The whore deserved it, whispered the deadpan voice of his mother; it had always been a voice that brooked no argument. She probably had sex with the next man she met after her fiancée died – if that’s even what he was. You saw her face. Druggies, druggies, one-two-three, you’re all dead just like me!
         Don had been running the tattoo parlor for two months, and he had never killed anyone – not in this city, and not in this state. Today he would have to close up shop and move elsewhere. But first, he had thirty more customers to go through.
         He cleaned up, replaced the needles and the ink, and as he always did in between customers, he sank down on his knees and prayed for a full two minutes, which seemed to lessen the headaches and made his mother’s screaming quiet down to a whisper. After that, he grabbed his clipboard, walked through the door and saw a man and his girlfriend holding hands and waiting in the lobby. They knew the rules, though – Don preferred to work one-on-one with the customer, to make sure he wouldn’t be ‘distracted’.
         “Mark Bergsten?” Don asked, looking at the tall man with blonde hair and a sallow face, “I’m Don. Would you like a glass of water?”