I told him I’m not a fan of face tattoos. I usually avoid talking usually during tattoo sessions for this goddamn reason. Sometimes I talk too much when I am high sometimes. My sister will ask for my opinion on her blouse and get wrecked when I point out her llantas. I complain about a fishy smell coming from the nail salon next door and the next thing I know someone is calling me a racist because the Vietnamese ladies in there were cooking pho or something. Nowadays, I prefer to keep my head down and just do my work, which is painstaking enough, tracing the gun along the client’s musculature or flab until each line, each detail is perfect to the client’s liking. I’m good at my job, and it’s not my job to pillow talk my clients like we’re doing each other’s nails at a slumber party.
Of course, this fella, Pablo is his name, shifted a bit, completely disregarding the fact I am holding an ink gun to his forearm. I asked him to stay still and his neck twists towards me. At 5 feet 10 inches, I know I can’t say he’s tall, but he’s fat-strong, you know, those cats that look like they could dominate a hot-dog-eating contest, but bench press six 45’s with a grunt or two.
I’m only five two, which you think would have taught me to watch my goddam mouth by now, but here I am, jabbering on about how I’m not talking about the tear drop tats or the stars women sometimes want around the corners of their eyes. I wouldn’t get one of those myself, but I can see their appeal and the webs around his left eye give him a sick look. But he asked me what I thought of the design I was working on, so I explained I just don’t personally see why people are into inking the Mt. Rushmore’s of lovers, children, or personal heroes on their backs, chests, thighs, and arms. How do you have sex with someone whose tender mother is watching you from their bicep? I don’t know about you, but the idea of seeing a stillborn’s face on the back of your lover during the throes of passion seems like a buzzkill.
Don’t get me wrong, I continued. People ask for plenty worse. Crudely drawn animals, American flags, engorged genitalia in exposed areas. I’m not a prude. One of my favorite designs I made for this gay guy. We lifted the black-and-gold gay sex scenes from an ancient Etruscan vase and inked them around his shin and calf. That shit was classy.
“It’s in honor of my father,” Pablo told me, cutting me off mid-inhale. “He died last week.”
Thank god I finally stopped talking.
His father was this Big Pun-looking motherfucker, who died of a heart attack “out of nowhere,” just like Pun.
I worked on the lines of the lips and moustache. The design would take at least another two hours to complete. Pablo had massive forearms. I regretted not playing the background music louder.
“Ma doesn’t want me to go to his funeral,” Pablo took a deep sigh. “You know, I expect that much from her. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was the one who called the cops on him in the first place.”
As if on cue, sirens blared past the shop. I didn’t say anything, but he kept going and going. It was February in LA, a cloudy day, and I was still all pit stains, sucking on the last few drops of my water bottle. I had another appointment at 6pm. For the life of me, I could not remember whether or not I turned off the pot of beans I left stewing on the stove.
According to Pablo, his ma falsely accused his pops of beating her.
“I ain’t never seen no bruises though,” Pablo said. “If anything like that happened it was in the past, back when she was cheating on him. It don’t make sense of her to bring it up now.”
That’s when the phone rang.
“Speak of la diabla,” Pablo said, picking it up on speaker. “Ey.”
“¿Adónde estas, hijo? Acaba de recibir una llamada de la escuela que los niños han estado esperando afuera por más que una hora. Tú sabes que yo trabajo los martes y tengo tres diferentes clientes ahora y no los puedo recoger. El José tiene hambre, diciendo que no ha comido todo el día porque solo lo sirven yucky en la escuela. Como no los ha enseñado a comer bien, ahora no están comiendo. Desde que tú has llegado yo ha estado para’riba y para’bajo con estos pitufos…” she went on and on and on, as Pablo simply went ey, ey, ey. Her voice sounded like a one of those old school vinyl records sped up and full of static.
“Tengo una cita ahorita y no los puedo recoger,” Pablo cut her off. “Llama a la Dina para recogerlos.”
He hung up.
“You see how she is?” Pablo said, shaking his head. “Didn’t even feed them before taking them to school in the morning.”
“Damn, whose kids are they?” I asked.
“Mine,” Pablo beamed.
“Oh,” I furrowed my brow unintentionally.
“What?” Pablo asked, twisting his neck again.
“Nada,” I lied. “Just working on some tricky shading right here.”
“Yeah, make sure it comes out dope,” Pablo said. “This means a lot.”
After forty-five more minutes of this man trash talking his mother, our front desk girl knocked on the door and cracked it open before I could even respond.
“There’s a woman here with some kids,” Cherry said. “They’re looking for a Pablo.”
I turned off the gun. Pablo’s face became dark.
“Señora, no puedes,” Cherry started but before she could get another word in, a large Latin woman busted through the door.
“Pablo, no son los niños de Dina, no son los niños de Yesika, son tuyos, y no los puedas dejar abandonado en la escuela por dos horas,” the woman trembled.
Behind her were two small kids. I was surprised to see them, of course, the whole studio was gathering to see the drama, but the most surprising bit about those two small kids was how well dressed and clean they were. Matching ironed button-up shirts and golf shorts, they waited quietly behind their abuela, faces muted in dark contrast to the baby blue and daffodil palette of their outfits.
“Ma, what are you doing here?” Pablo groaned.
“Señora, no podemos tener,” Cherry tried again.
“Me voy,” the woman spat. “Si pierdo este cliente dios sabe lo que vamos a hacer, Pablo.”
Her voice broke at this last line.
“Gramma luff yoo berry mush,” she hugged the kids goodbye, kissing their foreheads.
“Let’s reschedule,” Pablo said, rising from the chair.
Next to him, the kids shrunk, dwarfed and docile as cubs, frightened yet curiously looking at his new ink, his shaggy mane of hair.
I usually don’t smoke before sessions, but of course, the day I do that all happens to me. Lucky me, I had an excuse to give folks when they asked why I was out of it for the rest of the day. Crazy day at work, I told Victor after I spilled my beer reaching for the bar menu. That’s called opening up.
Victor and I go way back. We tried to align our class schedules during middle school, but by the time high school hit, I was basically skipping everything except for art and gym and Victor was competing for a spot in the few AP courses our school had to offer. By that point, fools started calling us Victor and Loser—my name is Lou—our diverging paths marked out for us by the time we hit fourteen. But it was whatever. Victor could have gotten all uppity and left me for his jock nerd athlete debate decathlon homies, but nah, he always shut them down when he could, asking to check out the latest shit in my sketchbook. He went to UCLA and everything, even tried to get me to apply for some becas. It took a while to convince him to see my vision, and I don’t blame him for getting all concerned about me when I started tattooing classmates in my bedroom for free to build up my portfolio. Victor came out of UCLA a whole-ass computer scientist with a jaw-dropping wifey from Pakistan, and I worked my way from my bedroom to a studio in the La Calavera Collective space next to the KFC and Ethiopian spot. In contrast to Victor though, at this moment, I was single as fuck.
Single is the codeword for I was dumped, which again is a codeword for something way worse. Because I lost my virginity a solid six years before him, I never thought I would be in the position where I would be asking Victor for girl advice, but after everything got fucked up with Veronica, I had no idea where else to turn.
“So, what’s good with you, man?” Victor asked after cleaning my drink. “You alright?”
I took a deep breath.
“On the real, I’m just trying to get lit,” I laughed, pulling out a tiny bottle of mezcal from my pocket and winking.
“My dude,” Victor glanced at his watch. “It’s a Tuesday.”
“Yeah, but you just said you don’t got meetings tomorrow until 1pm. Just give Sidra a heads up. I know she wears the pants.”
Victor took a long sip from his stout. “It has been a minute since we kicked it,” he reasoned.
“Niloofar from Tinder wants to meet me at the Drop for some dancing.”
Victor nodded slowly.
“She got friends,” I added.
Victor flashed a chipped tooth grin.
If my text messages and bank statements are to be believed, Victor and I went HAM that night. I made it to my 4pm appointment five minutes late with a headache two Ibuprofen couldn’t squash and three glasses of water splashing in my gut.
“Sorry for making you wait,” I looked down at my notes. “Candida?”
“That’s me,” a light-skinned Black woman responded, a mane of shoulder-length curls bouncing as she stood. She had a heart-shaped face with a rose-gold nose piercing and hoop earrings. A pair of blue sweats and a black hoodie hid her figure.
Compared to Victor, who called in sick, I got off easy. I couldn’t remember anything after arriving at the Drop, Victor ordering shots, and Niloofar’s black-and-purple dress, which hugged the slither of her curves magnificently in the blur of the dance floor. My bank statement said I spent $173.45 on drinks alone, not including a 1am run to a late-night pupusas spot. Thanks to our rager, I would only be left with fifty bucks after rent was due in a couple days. I reminded myself of all this as my head pounded and I managed Candida’s paperwork, taking her inside one of our rooms.
Candida made a face as I handed her the paperwork folder with the sketch of the design: a black-and-blue fire rose symbol with Abadi script reading “My Body” up the left side and “My Choice” down the right side.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
Candida hugged the folder to her chest.
“Yes,” she sighed. “This is just a big moment for me.”
I gave her a small, quiet smile. “You said you wanted this on your lower abdomen?”
“Yes, from here,” Candida pointed about four fingers below her bellybutton, “to here,” her finger pointed downward about four more inches. “I followed the instructions you sent, waxed, and even bought some underwear I should be able to keep on during the session.”
“That depends if it gives me enough space to work,” I said. I bit my lip. “We want to make sure it looks good, and the fabric can get in the way of the design if you want it that low.”
I tried my best not to look creepy or intimidating. Rather than smile or show any warmth, I decided to just let my inner hangover take over, complete with a small yawn, to capture how utterly tired I felt. Being five two helped a bit in that regard as well.
“Fair enough,” Candida nodded.
“It’ll hurt like hell.” I looked her in the eye.
“I’m no stranger to pain,” she gave me a small smile.
I reclined her back on the chair so that the top half of her body lay reclined, and I kept the footrest down, so I could have space to work between her legs. She took off her sweats and stuffed them in her purse beside the chair as I prepared the tattoo gun.
The first thing I noticed was the tattoo on her right thigh. It was a remix of the image on the Mexican flag: an eagle standing on a cactus with a serpent, only instead of the eagle biting into the serpent, the serpent had wrapped itself around the neck and body of the eagle and bitten its neck. It was one of my favorite designs that I had inked years back when I was getting started, literally the front page of my portfolio. The ink had aged well, most of the colors just as vivid as the day I cut them into her.
“Oh my god, that’s my design,” I smiled. “You been here before.”
Candida laughed. “Yeah, I wasn’t sure if you would remember me.”
“Damn, this still looks fresh!” I knelt to look closer at her thigh. Even the hangover disappeared momentarily. “Didn’t you get a scholarship to get a PhD or something?”
“You do remember,” Candida smiled. “Yeah, ethnic studies in Boulder, Colorado.”
“That was like, what, three years ago?” I let my eyes go big. “Should I be calling you doctor?”
“Nah, nah,” Candida laughed. “I haven’t even defended my dissertation proposal yet. It’s been a mixed bag. I’m taking a gap year to recuperate myself before jumping back in.”
“Oh, what happened?” I asked. “School can be a real motherfucker, I hear.”
Candida took a big sigh, one so heavy, her hoodie seemed to hang lower afterward.
“I guess, I might as well tell you since it’s why I’m here,” she looked me in the eye and attempted to smile. “My ex-boyfriend put his hands on me, and I’m here to…” Candida broke eye contact and trailed off.
I stopped breathing, my muscles froze, and I felt my eyes twitch immediately. Candida interpreted all that as sympathy, which it was and it wasn’t. Either way, her eyes were soon brimming with tears, as my heartbeat jackhammered throughout my chest and temples. I could even feel it in my fingertips and toes.
“I just need time to recover and reclaim myself, you know,” Candida took a deep breath. “I need to do something for me, just for me. I actually came back here because I had fond memories of this session,” she rubbed the tattoo on her thigh. “It was big, my first tattoo and you distracting me throughout the session made it a bit easier.”
“Yeah, I don’t always click with my clients,” I snorted and turned around, pretending to search for something in one of the drawers. My skin tingled as I rummaged and rolled my neck, trying to shake off the current of anxiety. “That session was a good memory,” I mumbled.
In my mind’s eye, I wasn’t watching a young Candida brace and relax, as I stabbed and dabbed her thigh. I saw Veronica, so mad, so scared, she didn’t slam the door. She left it wide open to the hallway of our apartment complex, its white walls stained a pale yellow from the smoke and oils of immigrant kitchens. A spider lowered itself on a single thread of silk from the clock we kept above the doorway, its legs opening and ticking in the air. Veronica usually called on me to smash the spiders with a nearby magazine. That day, I let her hang. For five whole minutes, I left the door open, hot tears becoming cold on my face, as if closing it would force time forward, as if time wasn’t already speeding past me at the speed of a burning heartbeat.
I took a deep breath and turned around, holding a Saniderm bandage we wouldn’t need until much later. I drew my attention to Candida and the work at hand. Three inches below her bellybutton was just about where the soft pudge of her belly ended and the lean downslope of her lower abdomen began. Lower abdomen here was a codeword for what other studios would call a FUPA or vagina tattoo. Nobody is getting their vaginas tatted. It’s just that the average person can’t be bothered to distinguish between a vagina and a vulva. Her underwear went up to right about where her finger stopped.
I cleared my throat.
“Where exactly do you want the design again?”
She pointed again from right below her pudge to the top of her underwear, about four-to-five inches lower.
“Ideally, I need two inches to work from on each side,” I looked her in the eye. “Maybe we can make the image smaller, so you can keep your underwear on? Whatever you’re most comfortable with.”
My eyes started to sting, and I wondered whether I was blinking too much. Her eyes shone in the studio light, still and placid as dark marbles inside her expressionless face.
“No biggie,” Candida said, pulling her underwear off, putting on her headphones, and leaning back to stare at the ceiling.
As I sanitized the area, I remembered Veronica. Not our sex, no, but rather, how in the days after she left and blocked me on social media, I lost about a hundred followers on all my platforms. Most of them were distant friends, people I knew because of our relationship, but there was also a handful of close mutual friends that just disappeared. I didn’t reach out. No point. I stayed off social media as much as I could, except for work and communicating with a handful of homies and my family.
Candida was not my first lower abdomen tattoo, although it was my most elaborate. Once a white woman wanted a small trail of hearts gliding up the side of her lower abdomen to her right hip. Another Latina wanted to cover a scar with a brown that more or less matched her skin. Neither of those two moments shot fear up my arms the way touching Candida had. Worry was at the front of my mind, not for the design, not about my own artistic skill to pull it off, but for myself. Even though I was the one holding a tattoo gun in my hand, Candida was the one with all the power. She could say whatever she wanted to about me. I became hyperaware of her breathing, the twitch and shifts of her muscles, and the bass in my head pounding like a bad trip at a rave. I took two deep breaths and turned on the tattoo gun.
As usual, Candida’s breaths deepened as I began the first lines of the design. In a minute or two, I would sink into my work. She would be nothing but a canvas, a coloring book. I could complete the design in two or three hours and be done. This is what I told myself those first seconds as I sank the needle into her flesh and deeper into my work.
But then her breaths began to pick up. At first, it only lasted five seconds before she held her breath and breathed slowly again. Her breaths were whistling out of her though, as if she were straining her neck and clenching her chest, not slow and heavy, as it should be, relaxed. Before I could finish adequately tracing an outline of the design, she gasped, her breaths finally started fluttering like a scared bird out of her lips. I turned off the gun.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Candida cried, her hands covering her face.
“Can I get you some water?” I asked. I didn’t ask what was wrong. I knew. I didn’t want to know. Candida nodded.
I washed a glass in our kitchen area as thoroughly as possible. I filled the glass and drank the water myself. I wanted to go as slow as possible to give Candida as much time as she needed pull herself together.
I washed the glass again.
My argument with Veronica started because I had failed to wash the dishes again. It was a stupid argument. Of course, it wasn’t about the dishes. Yet she washed them with a moxie that could only be driven by hatred and resentment. I tried to calm her down by hugging her waist from behind and kissing her neck. The second my hands touched her she spun around, knife in hand. She was washing the knife. The force of the spin brought the knife right up to my face. I panicked—no, it wasn’t that—I felt my cheeks get hot and I pushed her away. She hit the sink and a couple of glasses near the edge of the counter fell, as did she, landing on top of the broken glasses.
“You okay?” I asked. I didn’t try to help her up.
“Are you okay?” Cherry asked, placing her hand on my shoulder. “You’ve been washing that glass for over a minute.”
I gasped and jerked back, almost fumbling the glass.
“Whoa there,” Cherry said. “Didn’t mean to startle you. You good?”
I laughed like a thousand glasses falling from the counter.
“Damn, Cherry, you scared the shit out of me,” I said, leaning my back against the sink and drying the glass. The room was a tilt-a-whirl, my favorite ride in the amusement park as a child, I wanted to throw up.
“My bad, Louie,” Cherry stepped back. “I ain’t never seen you so jittery before.”
“Just drank a little too much,” I laughed. “Coffee. I drank too much coffee.”
Cherry side-eyed me before leaving the kitchen area with her yogurt. “Make sure to hydrate, Lou.”
I knocked the door to the studio where I left Candida. “It’s Lou.”
“Come in,”
I found Candida sitting upright in her reclined chair, her hands relaxed, folded over her crotch.
“Take this water,” I said, quickly closing the door behind me.
Candida drank.
“You know, I once did a boudoir photoshoot in my early twenties. I didn’t even tell my boyfriend at the time because the photos weren’t for him. They were my way of embracing my hips, my stretchmarks. In Peru, I skinny-dipped with a group of co-eds on a study abroad. It’s not like me to be like this. I’m not fragile. I don’t know who this person is,” Candida’s glass was empty. It looked like she poured it over her cheeks.
“You know that this has nothing to do with the tattoo,” I responded, taking a seat on the stool. “It’s a bodily response, your brain playing tricks on you. It’ll be like that for a while. I’m not sure I’m the one to help you through all that. Do you really think you can follow this through?”
“I know I got this,” Candida said. Her eyes were alive this time, something cracked and crackling inside them. “Is it okay if I cry?”
“I make people cry all the time,” I said. It felt like the most honest statement I had given in months. “Let me get you another glass of water first.”
The session took another three hours. Candida wept openly as I needled and prodded her skin, sweating. It took all of my might and focus to stop my arm from trembling as I turned her skin purple and blue.
When I returned home, I had a message from Ivan, Veronica’s brother. The couches were hers. Ivan and his brothers would pick them up Saturday at 2pm. They would use her key to get into the apartment.
This must mean Veronica had secured her own apartment. There was no room for the couches in her parent’s home.
“No problem,” I texted back. “I’ll be away on a work trip.”
Hungry as hell when I left work, I let the bucket I bought from KFC grow cold on the table, instead laying down on the couch, empty and exhausted. I tried to sleep but couldn’t. Too much anxiety. I obviously didn’t have a work trip, but there was no way I was going to be alone with Veronica’s three hood-ass brothers after what happened.
I opened my phone. Maybe I could schedule something nice with Niloofar. A long movie, a dinner, a walk on the beach, maybe even a fuck at her place, anything as along as it swallowed my entire day.
I opened Tinder in an attempt to find Niloofar, only to find that I was banned. I deleted the app and tried again, thinking I could use a different email or something, but nope, I was banned, permanently it seemed.
I had no idea what I would do on Saturday.
The breaded part of the chicken was rubbery by the time I got to it Thursday night. I didn’t even bother heating it up. I spent all day in bed, doomscrolling social media, watching YouTube videos. Half of my ads were for therapy apps eager to solve my problems: Woebot, TeleHealing. It seemed like no one wanted to talk to me in person and some of the people weren’t even people. The rest of the ads were bro science, bruh-reviewed tips on how to attract more women with the magic magnet of your pheromones. I took another hit and continued to watch out-of-date rap battles.
After the bullshit that went down with Pablo our first session, I considered telling him I was booked a few months out in hopes that he would turn elsewhere for his daddy issues tattoo. Instead, I booked him on the Saturday.
As luck would have it, Niloofar texted me the same day in the middle of my cold, day-old chicken dinner. It was a picture of a wet spot on brown-and-pink polka dot sheets. From last time 😉 it read. What you doing this weekend?
I spent so much of that day worried I had drunkenly disrespected Niloofar and been reported to Tinder that I didn’t even register excitement or joy from her message. Rather, I felt the same way I did then as I did when I was tattooing Candida. Like a fraud.
When I arrived at work on Saturday, I found the woman who had busted her way into my studio earlier that week sitting in the lobby. In contrast to the shabby blue uniform she wore earlier in the week, on this day she sported a pink and red floral dress. Peaceful as a church lady, she was humming to herself when I opened the door.
“Buenos dias, joven,” she nodded at me.
“Solo ab low po kito espanish,” I said. “Como tay a judo?”
“My name Teresa. My son come here,” the woman said. “Give me babies.”
“Low shen toe?” I tried.
“You tattoo?” the woman asked.
“Yes, I am the tattoo artist,” I nodded.
“I have tattoo,” she smiled, tugging her dress off her left shoulder.
Tucked just below the knuckle of her shoulder, about the size a walnut, waved a thin inky outline of Betty Boop. It was a surprisingly trashy look for such a pious-looking old indita,
“Oh,” I smiled at her.
“I get it when my dad die,” she covered her shoulder again. “El Salvador.”
“Pupusas,” I nodded.
“Si, pupusas,” the woman responded. “I make them.”
“My dad was from El Salvador, too,” I said.
Around this time, Pablo pulled up. The two boys jumped out of the backseat of his car, and the three of them joined us in the lobby. The children clamored towards their abuela. Their shirts were stained with spaghetti sauce or something else that was red and yellow.
Thirty minutes away, Veronica’s brothers removed the couches from my apartment. They also took the mattress, which was also Veronica’s, and one of our drawers in the bedroom, spilling all its contents onto the floor: miscellaneous electronics and important tax documents scattered about the carpet amid dirty socks and chonies. They left a note warning me to never contact her, her family, or our mutual friends again.
The door was unlocked when I arrived on Sunday morning after spending a night with Niloofar, listening to her tell me her tattoo ideas she was too afraid to commit to just yet. I traced them along her body with pens to give her an impression of what they would look like. Spending time with Niloofar was magical because she knew nothing about me. I could be a completely different person. Someone I wanted to be. Someone I wasn’t. Someone I wasn’t yet.
For the next four hours, however, I listened to Pablo complain about his mother’s influence on the boys. I kept my mouth shut this time. The younger one was coming out soft, gay, Pablo said, wanting to play with makeup. I thought of the time I played with makeup when I was eight with my mother. I had my face dressed up like some sort of drag clown, before my mom found me. Rather than punishing me, she showed me how to apply it. In that afternoon, I mastered wings, eyeliner, and lipstick. I was just a kid that liked to create art on skin. If makeup itself could have softer, I wondered who I would have become, whether they would still call that person a mujeriego.
I wondered what tattoos the kids would get of Pablo when he died.