Tattoo

I stare at the tattoo on my leg. Right side of my upper thigh. The skin is blindingly pale.

I look away from it. Back at the phone in my hand. Jeff had asked if we wanted to hop on to play Halo. Byers said he needed 20 minutes. Just enough time to justify not starting any task other than sitting on the couch and staring at my phone. That’s how it happened. Slouching back against the one good cushion of the pilled and lumpy black couch. My shorts, the ones she had bought for me, rode up above the stark tan line and revealed the tattoo. Right side of my upper thigh. My eyes go back to it.

The tattoo is not any real shape. Well, it’s a shape because anything that’s drawn is a shape, but it doesn’t mean anything. Well, it doesn’t mean anything unless you know what it means. What I mean is that it looks like a tattoo with no meaning or intent unless you’re in the loop.

If I saw it on someone else’s leg, I’d guess it was maybe the shape of a country in the middle of Europe, an Austria or Hungary. Or a cloud that looks realistic, not like those ones that look like scoops of ice cream out of a mom-and-pop shop at the beach, though sometimes those clouds are real, too, but usually non-drawn clouds look like this, two-dimensional and weird. Or the shape of the divot left in the broken cork of a bottle of wine.

It is not any of those things, and they are also never how she described it and so never how I can honestly think of it without trying really hard. She always described the shape as a tea stain, a little bit of liquid splashing out of the cup onto the tablecloth and claiming its territory. Light brown spot with just a little more melanin on the most linen-colored part of her leg, set forever. She told me her mom had the same birthmark on her leg, too, same spot, just a little bit bigger and darker. Coffee stain.

She didn’t want me to get this tattoo. She wasn’t really a fan of tattoos in general, but she had a particular problem with this one.

“Don’t get my birthmark tattooed on you! That’s so weird. If you’re going to get one, get my name or something.”

But I insisted that this was way more romantic and she gave in. We drove to the tattoo parlor together and she hitched up her skirt so the artist could see the shape-that’s-not-a-shape, and he traced its outline in black onto my skin. 

I didn’t know this before I got it, but hair grows back over tattoos, so I would always shave that small patch of my leg so nothing obscured it. She made fun of me for it, smiled and called the sentiment and my leg-shaving “girly.” But then she’d kiss her index finger and press it to the heart of the shape, right in the white space. 

When I was a kid, there was this urban myth about why we had birthmarks. 10-year-olds don’t care about the words “deposit of melanin” or “skin aberration.” No, birthmarks were a sign of something else. They were the places where you were killed in your previous life. If you had none, you were brand new.

I stare at the birthmark I insisted upon giving myself. Right side of my upper thigh. I can see coarse grass beginning to sprout in the fields of this vaguely European country. Chocolate raindrop sprinkles in an ice cream cloud. Grains of black sugar in tea stain.

Would it be better or worse if I had chosen to tattoo her name instead? Would it still feel like her penultimate death written on my body, too?

Winter 2022