The Tattoo Artist
By: Ting Lam


When she still owned the tattoo parlor,
she complained about it every day.


She didn’t seem to remember when she,
a college sophomore who had never taken an art class,
trudged 2 miles off campus to a tattoo shop,
its windows covered with designs of skulls
and hearts, and dragons, and scorpions and sparrows
so hardly any light shone through inside.
She heard a woman cussing from
behind the curtain of beads and waited for
the man, arms fully clad in the same tattoos
on the windows, to notice her.
A nod, and she asked the question.
He replied, “I don’t want to shatter your dreams,
but you really have to be determined.
If you do this, it means you stick with it
for the rest of your life. And you’ll have to start
by practicing a lot on yourself.”
She politely said sorry to bother you, left,
and didn’t think about tattoo-ing others for a while.


One day after she dropped out of college,
she heated up a sewing needle
and pricked herself. It pierced the skin,
she bawled, but still convinced herself
to order a fancy tattoo machine from a catalogue.
She read the manual over and over,
learning about electromagnetism and the dual-coil.
Then, one arm weighed with the device, the other arm
jabbed a thousand times with a needle, like
being crushed by a shark’s jaws again and again.
Her first piece of art: a simple square.
She cried again, tears cooling her sore arm,
because maybe, after all, she can be an artist.


Since then, she inked herself with complex designs,
until her left arm had no room: hearts and skulls
border each other, dragon scales running up her bicep,
a ring of untattooed skin around her first square.
Saving money to open up her own shop,
she ate instant ramen 5 times a week
and gave tattoos to poorer people who trusted her
from what they can see on her left arm.


The tattoo parlor didn’t boom with business.
At best, she made enough money
so she had to eat instant ramen only twice a week.
The dual coil heavy, the damp, dark loneliness,
the same old designs people requested:
they smothered her, the coils running veins
around her right bicep.


“It means you stick with it for the rest of your life…”
but nothing stuck except for the old tattoos
and that small square near her wrist.