Twisted Ink

TW: Pain, Body Horror, mild language

Okay, I always heard that getting a tattoo would hurt. I totally thought I was ready for the series of pricks that would make up that first line.

I was not. And I was a complete baby about it.

My tattoo artist grimaced as she attempted to brace my arm and stop it from shaking like a leaf. I was sniffling constantly, my nose more of a loose faucet than the olfactory device it was made to be. The woman had stopped speaking to me, the slight conversation we had upheld while placing the stencil getting tossed away in favor of any ounce of extra concentration. I felt terrible for her.

That being said, the pain was enough that I still really felt worse for myself if I was being honest.

I glanced at the work slowly blossoming on my lower arm. The outer-space scene would take up a decent streak of skin, stretching virtually all the way from wrist to elbow. I bit back complaints; the woman had warned me when I selected this design from her flash sheet that it was a large undertaking for a first tattoo. I had told myself then that I shouldn’t care about details like temporary pain. That was the design that had spoken to me, and therefore that was the one I should get for something as serious as a tattoo.

Repeating that to myself did nothing to ease the biting pains, so I switched tactics and bit down on the inside of my cheek. Much better. That burst of pain functioned as a significantly nicer distraction from the pain than any mere thoughts. The shaking in my arm subsided slightly, and it was like the artist zero-ed in to make the most of the slight reprieve. Bold lines of black were beginning to fill in the details of the design. At least the pain would be well worth it.

The appointment took hours. By the time it was over, I was pretty sure my arm would have preferred to fall off versus come home with me. I dangled it loosely at my side and tried to pay attention to the aftercare instructions. Leave it covered for a couple of days. Rinse gently with soap and water. Moisturize. Easy. I nodded along to the different explanations and reasonings, and was thrilled to escape and scamper home as soon as I was released by the artist.

My bed was calling.

The first day was easy. Really, it was once the itching started that I began to get more worried that something was wrong with my new piece of permanent art. I had always been terrible about leaving mosquito bites and the like alone, and the ache of desire that I felt toward scratching at the healing wound ate at me like nothing else. I lasted about twelve hours. During the night, deep in dreamland with my long hair wrapped around my head like a womanly mummy, my left hand connected with my healing arm under the blankets and I let go of all my defenses. I scratched and scratched and woke up thinking that my period must have come early.

I was laying in a pool of blood.

My arm screamed in pain, and the deep gashes from my nails intersected the scarring, raised lines from the tattoo. I had thought the woman had done an okay job at the time, but the internet would later tell me that those ridges should have been the first red flag about this entire experience.

When I woke up all bloody like that, I sprang up in bed. I didn’t even check how long I had until my morning alarms would start going off, I just ran into the bathroom and turned on the shower. The hot water touched the exposed, red skin and I swear that steam bubbled off me from the searing burn of that ripped open skin. The design was obscured from the latticework of my own hand and I cursed loudly. What were the odds that I had just managed to mar my arm by my own doing right after adding something so cool to it? I tried to take deep breaths and reassure myself. People had to have done this before. I would just call the tattoo shop and get their professional opinion. Maybe the woman who had done the tattoo could recommend a different aftercare that helped with the itch more.

I reached for the phone the moment after turning the water off. I didn’t even bother to drape a towel over myself, I just sat naked on the edge of the tub and called Reviled Tattoo Shop.

The number didn’t connect and I sighed, exasperated at how much of my mental capacity had been taken up by my arm this morning. This was going to make for such a long day.

I didn’t register that there was no voicemail for the shop. My phone hadn’t even rung properly when I had called the business. My brain waved away the freak occurrence, computing it as the shop not being open so early in the morning. Even if I had registered the conundrum, I probably would have ignored it due to the fact that any shop with the name “Reviled” probably didn’t care about their customer service that much.

God, there are so many details that I am remembering as I recount these days that did not stand out whatsoever when the time had first passed.

I resolved to stop by the shop after my workday. The tattoo was very obviously still angry with me for its overnight treatment, but I was not a particularly early riser and the corporate world beckoned. I gently pulled a loose-fitting long-sleeved shirt over my torso, and ran out the door.

I checked on the swelling, peeling, burning mass of skin a couple times throughout the day. At one point, I ran a finger across it all just to familiarize myself with its current scabby nature and all of its bumps and irregularities. I figured that I should not shy away from looking at it. If I did, and it got worse, I wouldn’t be able to explain the transitions it had undergone to the professionals. When I did, when my finger brushed the hairs and skin right at the edge of the work and touched down on the design, I almost launched myself out of my office chair.

I could have sworn that my finger had sent a ripple through the skin of my arm.

A handful of faces peered around walls toward my cubicle, and my face turned bright red. They must have thought I was sleeping on the job and had jumped back awake. I was not going to tell them differently. The idea that my coworkers would think of me as someone who slept during work was nowhere near as damning as the idea of telling them that science was fake and my skin was somehow now both a solid and a liquid at the same time.

Anyone could see how that would have gone down.

When the clock chimed five o’clock I raced out of that building and sped over to the tattoo shop. I arrived within half an hour, and was just telling myself how glad I was that I had gotten work done at such a closeby shop, when I pulled into the parking lot in front of dark windows and peeling paint. I shook my head, bewildered. The shop had been here; I would have sworn it on the Bible in front of any judge and court in the country. However, when I unbuckled my seatbelt and went up to those dark windows, I peered inside to see a fully abandoned building, with no tattoo equipment whatsoever but a hell of a lot of rotting wood and exposed nails littered across the floor. The place did not look like anyone or anything had resided in it for years.

I ran back to my car, and pulled my knees to my chest in the driver’s seat. Then, I looked through my photos and pulled up the mirror selfie I had taken during the appointment, when I was trying to check that the stencil of the design was in the right place. I looked at the location and it matched perfectly to that damn abandoned building.

I tried to keep my breathing regular.

I did a shit job.

Suddenly, pain exploded from my arm and I screamed. This wasn’t an itch, or even the same pain as what had been present when the work was being done. This was a small black hole on my arm, shredding my skin and twisting the muscles of my arm into an impossible, hollow shape. I stared in horror. My arm had an opening in it, a small cavern like would exist beneath a loose floorboard. My eyes could not make sense of what was inside.

It was money. It was thousands and thousands of dollars, laid out in rows much deeper than the circumference of my arm. I proceeded to scream until the eyes rolled back in my head and I passed out from lack of oxygen.

When my consciousness returned, it was to the sound of someone pulling on my car door. It was locked; thankfully, I was the kind of person even then who compulsively locked their car doors. I could see the figure just outside my window though, and to go from passed-out-lack-of-thought to holy-shit-I’m-in-danger was the worst way to wake up, ever.

I screamed. They didn’t even jump, just kept pulling on my door handle. I never thought to pay attention to what the person looked like. I just rammed my keys into the ignition, and peeled out of that lot and onto the highway as fast as my tires could take me.

That night, I paced my apartment for hours. The skin on my arm still screamed more than it itched, which was an awful consolation prize for my shitty afternoon. The design could be seen again, with the welts from my nails calming down to a pale red. I decided I must be crazy. I had been in the wrong parking lot earlier, or I had dreamed the entire thing when I had passed out. I would go back tomorrow and the shop would be there and all would be okay.

The next day, the shop was not there. The third day, I went up and knocked on the door.

No one answered, but the door was broken and creaked inwards as soon as my hand touched it. I was surprised it hadn’t been flapping in the breeze it opened so easily.

“Hello?”

No one answered me, but the building got very cold very fast. I wished I had at least brought my camera so I could capture the spooky, abandoned ambiance. Out of nowhere, pain raced from my arm through the rest of my body and I collapsed onto my knees from the surprise. I stripped immediately, expecting to see another round of blood pouring down from the tattoo. There was only that damn black hole.

This time, I didn’t pass out. I didn’t freak out. I reached towards the opening with my other hand, and let my pointer finger cross the threshold of where my skin should have been. It was like plunging my finger into water, or some other see-through liquid. I pushed my hand deeper, letting the feeling wash over everything as I reached in and grabbed at the top stack of bills. I had to know if they were real, physical things. With one in my hand I pulled back, and brought everything back into the light. A thousand dollars. I had just pulled a thousand dollars from my arm.

“You weren’t supposed to find that.”

The voice came from the back of the room, and I couldn’t help but think that I had heard it before. An actor? A friend? I scrambled up and dropped the money and scowled as I looked towards the darkness.

She stepped towards me. My tattoo artist. I couldn’t even remember her name.

With the darkness of the room, the abandoned nature of it all, the series of weird circumstances, the money… my head was reeling. I stood frozen, watching the unsuspecting woman approach. With every step she took, the whirlwind in my head got louder and my vision more and more faded. I dropped back down on one knee and found myself looking up at the woman.

“Who are you?” I asked through gritted teeth, my curiosity getting in the way of the multitude of better questions I could have asked.

“Well…You could say that I am about to be you.”

I didn’t have time to protest or question the statement before she grabbed onto my arm, right above the open vortex of a tattoo where the skin was still firm on my arm. Then, she dragged my appendage to the ground. I thought she might try to break it, but she pointed her foot up against the disappearing skin instead. It was as if her body liquified, dripping and slithering into my own. It was not a painful process, but I felt full, too full, as if my organs were duplicating and flooding my body with bubbles.

The thoughts in my head were not my own. They were hers and she was giggling and suddenly I was retracting, shrinking, splintering at the bones. I panicked and my body fought to respond, but no screams came forward. The best I could achieve was a slight thrash against the cold cement of the floor in this damn building. Words continued to become harder, until I wasn’t even able to open my mouth. When I tried, my tongue pushed against something pointy, without teeth to run over.

I squawked and bird feathers sprouted all at once. I was looking at my body from the outside, a puddle on the ground transforming into a bird and staring at this body that I had only ever seen in the mirror.

I squawked again, and flew up into the ceiling as the intruder who had taken over my body reached into what had been my arm, and began counting those thousands of dollars. There was no coming back from this - nothing I had ever known or seen or heard came close to giving me a reason why or how this all happened. All I know is that anything I had hoped to accomplish was now hers to take on. In a moment of panic, I dove for that arm, so that I could at least come along and see the end of this new protagonist’s story in my old shoes.