The Tattoo Artist by Jill Ciment

Author:Jill Ciment [Ciment, Jill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary
ISBN: 9780375423253
Google: dEcLvrS5I-wC
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Published: 2005-06-15T00:37:08.106000+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ll that remained of my drawings the next morning was a dusting of ash on Philip’s skin, except for two remarkably intact images—the black ship on his chest and the pale stigmata of Manhattan’s skyline rising out of his lower abdomen. On my own flesh, there were faint traces of those images in reverse from when he had finally held me against him during the night, made love to me, then wouldn’t let go.

We dressed, he in his tatter of sarong, me in my shredded boy’s pants, and stepped out of the cave just as dawn broke. The old woman and her cronies were already waiting for us by the trees, though they no longer bothered to conceal themselves. They walked up to Philip and surrounded him. I could see how intrigued they were by my drawings. Their general, our keeper, stepped front and center to examine my work in close-up. She scrutinized the ship and the skyline. Then, stepping back, she turned around and faced me, glancing down at the smudge of ship between my breasts, then at my blackened hands. Her tattooed brows rose up. She turned back to Philip and rubbed her fingertip lightly across my ship; the hull smeared in two. She ran it over the skyline: the tops of the buildings were wiped away. She examined her blackened fingertip, then held it up for the other ladies to inspect. They gaped at it as if it had been dipped in blood.

I couldn’t tell how much of her act was theatrics and how much was genuine shock at the primitiveness of our methods, but when she finally looked back at Philip and me, I swear I saw something that resembled pity for us beneath the maze on her tattooed face, inside her skin.

She walked back to the village, trailed by the others.

That afternoon, our daily allotment of food was left on a flat rock by the cave’s mouth. She must have put it there while we were napping. In addition to our regulation yams, she’d included a red hairy fruit that tasted like perfumed apples, two green bananas, one fish, a dollop of ambrosial honey wrapped in a banana leaf, and a set of tattoo needles—turtle shell, shark tooth, and bone.

I couldn’t make myself touch the needles.

On the next rock over, four stone pots of ink had been set in a circle. One contained the exact metallic blue-green shade an ancient copper dome turns when the sun strikes it. Another held what looked like purple squid ink. A third seemed to be filled with pulverized red orchids. And the fourth, black: it wasn’t mixed from an absence of color, it was mixed from the bounty of colors.

Kneeling, his long uncombed hair looking like the blond batting used to stuff sofas, his thin torso adorned with nothing more than smudges now, Philip gaped at the pots of liquid radiance. The inks were that beautiful.

He picked up the needle made of bone. It was a little longer than his finger.

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