This is the third installment of the short story "Ink" by Steve Metcalf as it first appeared in the second Event collection "Iron Bay."
INK
Steve Metcalf
Chapter Two
Ink
Jones parked outside the tattoo shop. It was called 3rd Ave. Ink even though the parlor was located mid-block, halfway between Rison Street and 8th Boulevard. He figured there was some history behind the name and made a mental note to ask Kira about it.
He never did.
It was six o’clock, and the evening was just getting started. Jones wore a pair of jeans and a silk t-shirt. He wore a flannel jacket against the cooling night, but it was not buttoned. The windows to the parlor were covered in artwork, band posters signed by musicians and movie posters that featured tattooed body parts. This was a creative way to block pedestrians from gawking at people getting work done.
The store sign was neon, but, somehow, not garish. It almost had a clean, modern feel.
Echoed by the interior.
Jones had pushed open the door a bit hesitantly. There was bell chime – an ancient security device that let the workers know, perhaps with their backs turned – that someone had entered the shop.
There was one artist working on a client on the left side of the room. Jones saw Kira standing by the counter of the store flipping through a book of artwork. She looked up at him, neither of the other two occupants glanced in his direction.
“Jones,” she said, smiling. “You made it.”
He nodded.
“Yeah, hi,” he waved, smiling.
He looked around the room. Much like the door and exterior windows, the walls were decorated with pictures, posters and drawings. There were some shelves scattered around the large front room. They held an odd mixture of what looked like antique equipment and hand-worked sculptures. All the furniture and equipment – including the counter that Kira was leaning on – was a sleek combination of stainless steel and black leather. The room was a study in contrasts accentuated by the low jazz music oozing out of the ceiling speakers. Jones smiled.
“Come on back,” Kira said while doing a come here move with the fingers of her right hand.
She stepped through a set of batwing doors leading into a more private back room. There was a very ornate Employees Only sign hanging above the passage. Jones followed.
* *
Jones followed Kira down a winding hallway. There were office doors on both sides of the corridor and they each had a very detailed, custom sign explaining what the purpose of the room was. Jones saw signs like “Equipment Storage,” “Artwork Database” and “Reflection Room.” There were also names on some of the doors.
“This used to be some sort of office or something,” Kira called back over her shoulder. “Like an H & R Block or something. They just adapted the architecture. Saved a butt-load on renovation costs. Here we are.” She stopped in front of one door and put her right hand on the handle.
He looked at the stylish poster on the side of the door.
“The Black Widow?” he read.
Kira nodded and smiled. She took her hand off the door and lifted it up to Jones, palm out. On the palm was a highly detailed tattoo of a black widow spider. The body of the spider took up her palm with the four upper legs spreading up her fingers and the four lower legs traveling down her palm, curling around her wrist.
“A nickname, I suppose,” she said, as she reached back down and opened the door. The décor was the same as the outer room – artwork adorning the walls, stainless steel furniture. There was a small display case in one corner with numerous books lined up and a few cast-iron letters used as book-ends. The letters didn’t spell anything, and Jones’s gaze slid right off them. Kira walked to this case and pulled open a book. The cover was cracked with age and the pages were well-worn. While most of the décor generically matched the rest of the building, there was an oak bookcase that seemed to be reserved for the resident artist. In this case, Jones could see a couple sculptures and several leather-bound books.
“Did you have any inspiration about what you wanted?”
“I don’t know,” Jones said. “I’m not sure.”
Kira placed the book on the top of the display case and waved Jones to sit down in the center chair. She sat on the small rolling stool earmarked for the tattoo artist’s use.
“People seek ink for numerous reasons,” she said, rolling the stool up close to Jones’s right side. “The reasons are always personal, but usually fall into four categories.” She ticked off points on the fingers of her left hand. “Preserving memories, displaying artwork, love or passion, and pain. There might be a fifth category, but that’s the group of people who simply do it just to do it. Sheep. There’s no personal attachment to the ink … they simply saw a celebrity, or thought they were making a rebellious statement, or all their friends were doing it.”
“Okay, sure.”
“You were staring at my work all evening at Jameison’s. And as soon as I brought up the subject, it sounded like it was something you had been thinking about for a while. So, what is it, Jones? What category do you think you fit into?”
There was silence in Kira’s office. The click of an ancient ticking clock. The burble of a small, stone Zen waterfall in the corner. Jones thought about the question.
“Artwork,” he said after a couple minutes. “Both to represent art on my body and to turn my body into art.”
Kira nodded.
“Okay,” she said. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
She rolled the chair to the display case and picked up the old book she had originally held. The wheels of the stool made a harsh sound against the polished concrete floor. She rolled back to Jones with the book in her lap.
She stopped in front of Jones and pulled the book open to a marked page.
“I wanted to show you this.”
Jones leaned forward.
“Holy crap,” he said.
“It’s called The Three Deaths,” Kira said, nodding. “It’s a very intricate design, full of detail that’s not often apparent until years after it is applied.”
“My God.”
The book was a leather-bound tome that had pages nearly a foot square. As Kira held the book open for Jones, he could see an image that entirely covered the right-hand page.
It was a detailed drawing. The top of the page represented three mountain peaks that, as the eye moved downward, blended into a forest and finally the rolling waves of the ocean. In between, though, were details that Jones was only able to start identifying. Here, a family of deer in the forest. There, a small hut with smoke curling and then dissipating from a chimney. Here, a fishing boat leaving a village. Was that the swell of a sea monster’s tail following the boat?
“That’s amazing.”
He tried to look away, to look back up at Kira who was beaming at him, but he kept finding more details. A hunter in the forest. A climber on the left-most mountain peak. He kept seeing new details almost every time he blinked.
“The design has remained unchanged for centuries although techniques have evolved,” Kira said, looking down at the book. “It typically takes three separate applications using three different techniques.”
“I can’t pull my eyes away from it.”
She smiled.
“The image is centuries old and, in some ways, is an optical illusion. It is said that the Hidden 3D Image posters that were all the craze in the early ‘90s were inspired by this design.”
Jones was staring at the page of the book. The Three Deaths. He was slowly, imperceptibly, leaning forward. Each detail, however, seemed to be more ominous than the last. Was that an eagle carrying a person? Did he see a Sasquatch leaning out from behind a tree?
“Let’s do it,” he said. He held his hand over his heart. “Right here.”
“I’m not gonna lie,” Kira said, putting the book down, still open, on a small stand next to Jones’s chair. “This. This is gonna hurt.”
She smiled, but there was something dark about it.
* *
She had given him something for the pain – just something to take the edge off. He swallowed three small pink pills that were shaped like diamonds with a plastic cup full of none-too-fresh water. Kira had gotten right to work. Even through the pain meds, Jones felt an occasional tug, pull, prod and pinch. Kira seemed to be talking more to herself than to her customer.
“The Three Deaths requires three separate applications, using three different techniques. Tebori, an ancient Japanese technique. Yantra from Southeast Asia. And a pretty modern version of dotwork. Done correctly, they all blend seamlessly.”
Jones looked down at his own exposed chest. Between the forced perspective and the haze of the oddly strong pain medication he couldn’t get a clear look at the work Kira was doing. To him, it looked at first like she was dipping a long, thin blade into ink and then carving the image into his skin. She was less tattooing him than drawing the outline of the mountains with a knife.
His head flopped back against the cracked leather of the chair. He smiled.
“What is it with you chicks and the bathroom?” he asked. His voice was low, and slightly slurred. “I mean, going in groups and all that. What are you guys plotting something? Going over stock tips? If guys all went to the toilet together, the whole exercise would degenerate into a what smells worse competition.” He smiled and giggled at the thought. “Every men’s restroom. Every one. Smells like an ass factory. Like. In the worst possible definition of the phrase.”
He closed his eyes. Kira looked at him for a moment, brushed the sweat off her forehead with the back of her gloved right hand, and went back to work.
“Are you going to tell me your name?” she asked without looking up from her work.
Jones shook his head.
“Are you going to tell me your first name?” she asked again without looking up from the tattoo that was beginning, ever so slightly, to take shape.
Jones, again, shook his head no. And then he began to snore softly.
Kira took the empty glass out of Jones’s slack hands, rolled over to the small sink in the corner, rinsed it, dried it and put it off the side. She rolled back over to Jones who was completely knocked out and smiling at whatever dream he was having . . .
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