Indelible Ink

I sat down on the chair, and placed my hand on the arm-rest. The tattoo studio was dimly lit, with the wall behind me filled with the artist’s images of his life’s work. Across me, perched on a shelf sat a skull, with the initials S K written on its top. It grinned widely at me, perhaps mocking my existential suffering while it sat disembodied from all the chains that life binds.

The artist held my forearm firmly, and lowered the buzzing needle onto my arm. In stoic acceptance, I prepared myself. The pain was expected, while the pleasure was not. It hurt like how a needle should, and yet there was a lingering sense of gentle happiness.

When the artist called fate touched the needle of companionship on our skins to draw the outlines of our life together, we bled, we winced and we smiled. There was the pain of our skins getting engraved, and there was a silent pleasure in the permanentness of it all. We hurt each other, with our wanton words, even more with our sharp silence. We gave each other joy as the outlines began to take a shape, a form of something concrete, something we could touch. As the artist began to fill in the patterns, as the needle started shading between the outlines, somewhere slowly we lost all feeling, and we became numb. And those lines grew wider apart, and we couldn’t recognize what bound us together anymore.

At the end of it all, we had left some indelible inks on each other’s hearts and soul- Some of it colored red, and some tainted with tears. Yet we have something to keep, for remembrances.

Johnny Cash sang in the background, asking if I had come here for forgiveness, or to play Jesus to the lepers in my head. Maybe I had come to play Pontius Pilate to the Jesus in my head.

"It's done", he said. "In time it will heal, and it will look beautiful everytime you look back on it. And you will be proud that you chose to experience this."
The tattoo artist's words had a profoundness that he didn't realize. I got up from the chair, and bid him adieu. Until the next one.