Holding Her Hand by Falkner Tammy

Author:Falkner, Tammy [Falkner, Tammy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Night Shift Publishing
Published: 2015-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

She looks down and I can feel the wind from her gasp. She covers her mouth and stares at her arm. Her eyes flood with tears, but she blinks them back furiously.

“You hate it,” I say.

But she stops me, waving her hand in the air. “It’s perfect.”

“I told you he knows you,” her dad says.

“He does,” she replies, her hands soft with emotion.

I knew a few things about her, going into the tattoo. Her favorite place to visit was the beach, back before her parents died. I had already done the male and female seagulls tattoo, which represents her parents, and it covers up the largest of the splash burns she has on her arm. The male bird looks really masculine, and the female bird looks really girly. They’re both wearing wedding rings on their legs, the same rings that hang on a chain around Lark’s neck all the time.

The challenge in this case was hiding the scars from her suicide attempt. They slice across her forearm. I also had to cover up a bunch of small splatter discoloration spots from where the hot oil hit her skin and burned her.

Her suicide scars were something I refused to hide completely. They’re part of her and she got through it, so I felt like it was important for them to stay there. I turned her suicide scars into clouds in a sunset sky. The jagged edges form the edges of the clouds. To an outsider who doesn’t know her story, one might think it is a perfect sunset. But it’s not. It’s a sunset fraught with challenges. But the thing to remember is at the end of the day, the sunset will always happen and it will always be beautiful. It’s one’s perception of it that matters. Do you see the scars or do you see the sunset? Some days, you need to see the scars. Some days, all you’ll see is the sunset, the perfect end to the perfect day. But to get to the perfect end, you had to face your challenges all along. We all do, and I wanted her tattoo to depict that.

I turned her small spatter scars into tiny seashells that litter the beach. They’re colorful and playful and she grins as she counts them. There are twenty-four in all.

When you look at the tattoo as a whole, it’s like a painting. But there are so many parts to it that I can’t even imagine anyone who looks at it would understand. But Lark understands all of them.

I watch her face as she takes in the tattoo. “Do you like it?” I ask.

“No.”

My heart stops. “I can cover it up with something else. Maybe in a few weeks,” I rush to say.

She catches my hands and stops them from moving, then lets them go.

“I don’t just like it,” she says. “I love it. It’s perfect. You put everything that’s important to me in it, and I’ll never stop looking at it. It’s wonderful.”

“Really?” I stare at her face.

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