A Taste of Ink Read online

  A Taste of Ink

  A Taste of Ink, Volume 1

  Daniel May

  Published by Daniel May, 2020.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  A TASTE OF INK

  First edition. December 20, 2020.

  Copyright © 2020 Daniel May.

  ISBN: 978-1393294948

  Written by Daniel May.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

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  Thanks to Lori Betawell for the cover, and for the public shaming.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Trinket chose a sleazy looking body art shop around closing time, because the idea had come to him spontaneously, and he circled the block about a dozen times — giddy with the idea, pulse flirting in faint apprehension, almost laughing at himself for being nervous, and for having the idea in the first place — before pushing the door open. A bell rang overhead. A girl with a face full of metal looked up from a glass counter.

  “Uh,” he said. “Do you do walk-ins?”

  He already knew they did, he had checked the Facebook page the whole time he circled the block, skimming over their hours and pictures of the artists’ work, thinking to himself, That looks good, right?

  As if Trinket had any idea what made a tattoo ‘good.’

  He had expected her to look at him — who he considered a straight-laced looking person — with surprise, in a ‘this guy isn’t the sort of guy who gets walk-in tattoos, what’s he doing here?’ sort of way, as if his inexperience should have shown in the everything-about-him, in the loafers and crisp-ironed clothes, his nerves clear on his face.

  “Yeah, we do walk-ins,” she said. “Let me see if there’s an artist available. Might depend on the size. We close soon.”

  “I know,” he said, almost guiltily. He had read their hours on their Facebook page while he wasted time pacing the block. Maybe subconsciously he had hoped that he would take too long and they would tell him ‘No, you’re too late. No, you can’t get ink permanently stabbed under your skin with needles. Not tonight.’ “Sorry,” he said.

  “No big deal,” she said. She hopped off a stool and went down the long counter to disappear into an open doorway, one with ominous buzzing sounds coming out of it.

  Trinket leaned on the counter, saw a second later a sign that said ‘please don’t lean on counter’ and stopped. He stood there with his arms at his sides feeling deeply out of place.

  Under the glass were rows and rows of jewelry destined for the human face. He scrutinized them in order to avoid interacting with the bunch of teenagers occupying the single leather couch, talking excitedly about whatever they were going to get pierced. One of them, a tiny girl flapping her hands anxiously, was clearly up next.

  “It doesn’t hurt that bad,” reassured one of her friends. “It’s just like, a crunch, and then it’s done. It’s only a second.”

  The crunch made Trinket wince.

  His pain was going to last a lot longer than a second.

  The girl from before returned. “What size, and what kind of design did you have in mind?”

  Shyly, he pulled the slip of paper out of his wallet and slid it across the counter. “Just in black and white.”

  She picked it up and looked it over. “The size of the paper?”

  “Um, maybe a little bigger.”

  “Where?”

  He gestured at the rough territory. “Kind of, lower stomach area, I was thinking.”

  “All right, I think that should be doable,” she said. “Have you had any drugs, alcohol in the last eight hours?”

  “No.”

  “Can I get your ID?”

  He handed it over, and rapidfire she began scanning the driver’s license and the drawing of the design, with an air of professional finality that made him feel like the moment to chicken out had passed. In a matter of moments she had a sheet printed out. She swiped it from the printer and pushed it, still warm, across the counter.

  “Hang on,” she said. “Let me grab an artist and double check before you sign that.”

  She went down the counter again, to a different curtained doorway. Trinket tried to focus on reading the fine print. The words disappeared in front of his eyes, replaced by a question in his own mind.

  Am I really doing this?

  “Mini, do you have time for a walk-in?” The girl asked someone behind the curtain.

  At first, Trinket heard ‘Minnie,’ thought of the mouse, and was surprised to hear a man answer.

  “Maybe I do,” came a lazy-sounding voice. “Maybe I don’t. Who’s asking?”

  The girl returned, accompanied by a man stripping off a pair of black nitrile gloves as he went.

  The man was, of course, heavily tattooed, colored from his knuckles to his jawline. He looked mid-twenties... young, not terribly tall, but with a sleazy maturity and air of authority that probably came with all that ink. He had nearly chin-length hair, cut like he’d done it himself over a sink but pushed back in a way that managed to be sleek. His eyes were dark, keen... even sharp. Those eyes gave Trinket a once over that felt invasive despite its brevity.

  Mini? Minnie? He didn’t look like either of those.

  “Show me,” said the man, and she handed over the piece of paper with the design. The artist gave it a quick glance, then went behind the counter to meet Trinket from the other side.

  Mini smiled at him.

  Trinket wouldn’t have called the smile ‘friendly.’ Something about the smile felt as sharp as the man’s eyes. Invasive.

  “How big?” asked Mini.

  Mutely, Trinket made a rough estimate with his hands.

  “Uh huh,” said Mini. “Where do you want it?”

  Again, Trinket indicated vaguely with his hands.

  He felt like the tattoo artist’s eyes lingered a little too long. And too low.

  But Mini’s eyes snapped back up so quickly that it could have been imagined.

  “Hundred fifty,” he said. “Cash up front.”

  “Oh,” said Trinket. “I didn’t—”

  “ATM in the corner,” said Mini, nodding his head past the couch of noisy teens.

  Something in Trinket’s stomach felt strange, something he chalked up to nervousness, but he went and got his cash anyway. The second he returned to the counter, Mini whipped the bills out of his hand and skimmed rapidly to count.

  “Great,” he said. “I’m going to go pay rent. Be back in thirty.”

  “Don’t you close in an hour?” asked Trinket.

  “I have the keys.” Mini dismissed Trinket’s concerns as he stuffed the bills into his pocket. “I’ll just close up when we’re done.”

  Before Trinket could protest, the guy was around the counter and out the door, jangling the same bell that had rung when Trinket first walked in.

  A glance around told Trinket that this was not totally unusual. The kids didn’t look up from their rapid discussion of who was going to get what hole punched in their face, and the girl at the front desk just scooted the printout on a clipboard over to him and handed him a pen. “He’ll be back soon,” she said.

  —

  Mini did not return until ten minutes before closing.

  Trinket had been sitting with probably as much, if not more, anxiety than the teenagers, finally earning a spot on the very edge of the couch where he read and reread the same magazine pages without seeing any of the words. The
teens came and went; they journeyed in a flock to the back, he heard a short, shrieking giggle that must have been the moment of piercing, and then they came back oohing and aahing over their friend’s new piece of jewelry. He couldn’t see what kind of piercing it was, only that it was in her ear. He thought about all the thick, cartilaginous parts of the human ear and felt queasy.

  Another walk-in piercing came and went. Two people finished their tattoos and filed out, swapping tips and aftercare booklets with the girl up front.

  And Trinket sat on the couch, wondering if he’d been scammed and if he ought to leave before he got locked inside the building.

  And then Mini walked in.

  He was wearing sunglasses and on the final sips of what must have been a giant iced coffee.

  He dropped the coffee in a trash can, threw his jacket on the counter, and pointed and snapped his fingers at Trinket in a single gesture. “You’re up,” he said, without looking at him. And proceeded to the back room, slipping behind the curtain.

  Trinket looked at the girl at the counter, buttoning up her own jacket to leave.

  “Is he—” Trinket struggled to find the right word, one that wasn’t accusatory but still managed to get his concerns across.

  “He’s great,” said the girl, without looking at him, fiddling with her fake eyelash in her phone camera. “Lightest hands in the business. Hardly feel a thing.”

  Mini whistled from the back room like you might for a dog.

  Trinket felt his face turn hot for no apparent reason.

  “See ya,” said the girl breezily.

  The bell clanged one last time as she showed herself out.

  Was that really it?

  Trinket stood a minute longer in the empty reception area, staring at his reflection in the glass on the cases, feeling at once very justified in walking out the door after her, and yet rooted to the floor by some kind of sense of obligation.

  He had handed over money.

  He had signed his name.

  He felt less like he was entitled to a tattoo and more like he had to get one, like it was compulsory.

  The sharp whistle came again — this time, not like you would call a dog, but like you might catcall someone on the street, the notes saying ‘yoo hoo.’

  Trinket’s cheeks flamed again.

  He turned and walked back to meet his fate.

  Pushing aside the curtain, he found the man on a computer with the scanned design pulled up, messing with contrast. “Trinculo Gao...” Mini read his name off the sheet of paper without actually turning to look at him. “What kind of name is Trinculo?”

  Trinket was used to this question, though he didn’t usually get such a flippant version. The man sounded like he didn’t actually care about the answer.

  So Trinket didn’t give one.

  “What kind of name is Mini?” he asked instead.

  “It’s short for ‘Vermin,’” said Mini, as if that were the most normal possible name and resultant shortening.

  Trinket couldn’t tell if he was joking. To be honest, the man fit ‘Vermin’ to a T, as if he had followed the destiny of his name all the way to a tattooed neck and knuckles. But wasn’t it a little on the nose?

  “Have a seat.” Mini waved his arm at the room.

  Trinket didn’t know what anything in the room was. It looked somewhat like a dentist’s office, with the vinyl couch, adjustable. Everything smelled like the dust of nitrile gloves and heavy sanitization. The cramped art on the wall showed pictures of body parts separated from their owners, an array of limbs and backs and torsos and no faces. The equipment on the trays could be identified by assumption. Little containers of ink. Still-packaged needles. The weaponized-looking thing, with the slightly pointed end and the cords running out the back must have been the actual tattoo machine. Tattoo gun? Was that what they were called?

  “Sit down,” said Mini again, with an air of impatience and authority that had Trinket sitting on the edge of the sticky chair and feeling immediately trapped, as lost as at the doctor’s office, not knowing what to do with his hands but leave them in his lap.

  “What kind of music do you listen to?” asked Mini.

  “Uh,” said Trinket. “I don’t know.” He had forgotten all music that ever existed. “No music.”

  Mini finally looked up from his work, swiveling in his chair to stare at the man sitting across from him. His gaze swept Trinket up and down. His expression was insulting, definitely invasive, and, finally, amused. “No music?” he repeated. “You don’t like any music? Are you a real person? Are you Amish? Whatever.” He turned, laughing, without expecting an answer. “Shirt off.”

  Trinket obeyed haltingly; it wasn’t cold, but the air prickled his bare skin anyway. He looked at his reflection in the long mirror across the wall. His skin looked especially bare compared to these walls, and compared to the artist’s full sleeves, tattoos that wreathed both sides of his neck in flowers. Trinket felt like a new level of naked — no clothes, no ink.

  He left his shirt on the table beside him.

  The printer hummed.

  Mini turned back again finally with the stencil. All business, all orders, he said, “Sit up straight and lean back a little,” without looking at Trinket’s face. Trinket obeyed. Mini rolled over on his chair, leaned forward, ran over the area once with an alcohol wipe, and began to lay the stencil on his skin.

  Trinket wasn’t prepared for the way his skin suddenly twitched, for the impulse to pull away that sucked in his stomach.

  “Jesus, relax,” said Mini, not bothering to disguise his impatience. “It’s just the stencil, I’m not even stabbing you yet.” He looked up, saw Trinket’s face gone pink, and came to a realization.

  He burst out laughing. “Oh, you’re shy?”

  “I’m not,” said Trinket immediately, and he wasn’t. A little socially awkward, a little inhibited maybe, but it wasn’t introversion provoking him right now.

  “It’s okay,” said Mini, with the soothing, too-wide grin of someone who did not mean to soothe. “Hey, hey.” He ran his knuckles down the center of Trinket’s stomach in the same fake-soothing way, very swiftly, pulling his hand back before Trinket could push it away. “There, see, it’s perfect. Look.”

  Trinket looked down; surprise disrupted his blush.

  He stopped short of touching the freshly laid pattern — the streaks and spirals of frost, swirls like ice-lace on windows in winter.

  A smile lit on his face.

  He looked across the room again, at the mirror, shocked to see how much the simple pattern changed his reflection. He looked different to his own eyes, suddenly like a new person. The kind of person who got tattooed by unnerving strangers after hours. It didn’t matter that the pattern only lay on top of his skin, not under it.

  He turned back to Mini and felt his new confidence shrink under the intensity of the artist’s gaze — Mini’s eyes burrowed into his stomach and traced each line like a fingertip, calculating all the way down. “How’s the location?” he asked. He touched the top, close to Trinket’s ribs, then the lowest point. Right above his belt. “The lines are good. This part will be the worst.” He pressed his thumb to Trinket’s lowest rib, tracing it to his side. “I tried to keep it away from the ribs. Ribs are a bitch.” As if to prove his words, he drew his thumb, pressed hard, up the side of Trinket’s ribcage. “See?” He misinterpreted Trinket’s flinch — or didn’t. “You don’t want to fuck with bone. Not your first time. This is your first time, right?”

  Hand dropping to rest on his knee, the artist actively sought Trinket’s eyes now, smiling when they were difficult to chase down. Trinket looked at the art on the walls instead. “It’s my first tattoo,” he said.

  “Don’t be nervous,” said Mini. “I’ll take good care of you.”

  Trinket made the mistake of looking at him — really looking at him. The artist’s eyes were big, dark, and close... and faintly red-rimmed.

  ...was he high?

  Had
he been late getting back because he had stopped to smoke?

  Trapped between his discomfort and his tied tongue, too concerned about making a rude assumption, Trinket said nothing.

  Mini patted his knee and went to flip on a small stereo.

  Classical music played, sweet and quiet.

  Was he being made fun of? Trinket wondered.

  His back to Trinket, the artist did whatever it was tattoo artists did, preparing needles or inks, opening a trash can with a stomp of a pedal and dropping in some kind of plastic wrapper. “I like your hair,” he said, his tone as sweet and mild as the music.

  Definitely making fun of him.

  Trinket kept his hair very long, nearly hip-length; he could afford to, working from home, and in academia at that. Normally he only left his hair loose at the house, and tied it up the back of his neck to disguise the length when going out. But because it was so late, and he hadn’t otherwise left the house today, now he only wore it in a loose ponytail.

  “How long did it take to grow that?” asked Mini.

  Trinket paused, then said, “Six years.”

  “That’s a commitment,” said Mini. “And a very specific number. I can look however I want with this job, but I imagine you’re, what? An accountant or something?” Clearly fishing for the dullest career that came to mind. “Why the long hair?” He scooted his chair back around with the whole tattoo gun — tattoo machine? — in hand, wearing his black gloves, his face businesslike once more.

  Trinket looked quickly away, and answered more quickly, to keep the panic out of his voice, his chest.

  “My boyfriend,” he said.

  “Boyfriend?” prompted Mini, coming up to rest his elbow on Trinket’s knee, eyes picking out the best spot to begin.

  “He likes long hair,” said Trinket.

  “That’s cute. How long have you been together?”

  The gun buzzed.

  “Two years,” said Trinket.

  Mini looked up. Trinket looked back down at him, aware of the color in his cheeks and unable to do anything about it. Mini grinned.