When I had asked you what you wanted for Christmas you hadn’t wanted to say, turning coyly away, but I needed to know. I had always admired the way you knew what you wanted, and how to get it. Want you wanted this time was a proof, in black and white. You had shared your home, so it was fair that I should share my body. You booked me into a parlour and kissed the top of my head.
The chair in the tattoo parlour was covered with dark green plastic and slightly sticky. I wondered if I might faint, I’d never been very good with needles or blood. You always laughed at me for hiding my face behind pillows when Casualty was on. But now I had something to prove. I lifted my top and exposed my back to the rapid exhalations of the tattooist breathing colour down my body. I timed my breaths to match his, taking my mind off the agony. I imagined the birth of my niece, the harsh grating of air in and out of my sister’s sweating face. I counted the grubby floor tiles as I lay face down. I could feel the loops of your name flowing hotly beneath my skin. My body had become a blank canvas to write our future on, and I was excited and scared in equal measures.
You thought it was so sexy, and you couldn’t wait to rip off the tissue, revealing its red hotness to the evening air outside the shop, like some lurid valentine. That night it throbbed, but I still let you feel it, raised on my skin like a wound, but I was no victim. I felt invincible as you cuddled me gratefully. My pain became our pain and we lay awake all night. For a month it excited you to pull me backwards by a belt loop so that the top of the letters were visible, like a teasing glimpse of cleavage, your own private peep show. This way you can never turn your back on me, you said, kissing the ink.
We loved that no-one else knew, not even my mother. We didn’t need to know what anyone thought of us. The tattoo made us feel daring and impulsive, like the first couple ever to have been in love. We would catch the first train at the station no matter where it was headed and spend hours wandering new towns. When the fridge stopped humming I did a day in an office, but I couldn’t talk to the girls there like I could with you, I just had nothing interesting to say. It was such sweet relief coming home to you that night, and you cooked spaghetti and told me I’d never be alone again.
Every day you would decide what we should do, until I stopped knowing what I would have chosen, should you have ever asked. My tattoo became a map, I’d twist my hand around my back to stroke it when I didn’t know what to do. It became a marker of ways in which to please you.
One morning as you pressed down onto my body you suggested a second tattoo, perhaps to curl around my belly button, dip inside it. I imagined myself covered in your name, like a child’s notebook. Loopy love hearts, easily torn out and replaced. I remembered the hockey socks my mother had sewn my name into to stop them getting lost. I tried to convince you that you could never lose me. Once I dreamt of my face tattooed into a mask of yours, and when I spoke, it told me it loved me.
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