Body Art
I’ve always fantasized about getting a tattoo. The kind of fantasy where you can’t quite tell if you really want it, except if it keeps coming to mind, surely on some level you do. But I’ve always been afraid. Not of the pain but the permanence.
It was the permanence, and not blood poisoning, that I feared when I colored my arm or leg with pens during middle school—or the glorious day when the girl I had a crush on borrowed my skin for an afternoon, hers already full of curlicues and flowers and cryptic text.
Glistening ink, so beautiful that I briefly believed my mom’s warnings about toxicity.
Except if that were true, I’d have been dead long before.
No, what scared me was the thought that it would stick to my skin, immortal as its magnificence promised, and then I’d never get to feel this again—the point of the pen rolling over me, tracing contours of muscle and bone I was just getting to know, an unwinding of sensation and color.
Of course, it came off with a bit of spit and rubbing, with only a shadowy mark left behind. Neither I nor my crushes, then or since, have ever scribbled hard enough to break the skin. I always become a clean canvas afterward. Ready for something else to be drawn on the open spaces.
So this? This we can do every day, every night, for the rest of our lives.
I want to say all of that, in this moment, but I don’t. Not because I’m forbidden to talk. I’m spread out before her, naked, for her use, but she’s always open to hearing what I’m thinking.
It’s because I fear even that kind of permanence, even now—though less with this woman than with anyone else. And also because I’m very nearly beyond speech.
I lie on a sheet on the floor. A thin sheet, the fabric a bit scratchy, pleasantly so.
A hard floor. The boards are uneven. One creaks as I shift position.
It’s warm down here; the heater breathes about two feet to my right.
Nonetheless, goosebumps ripple across my skin as her shadow passes over me.
I hear her inhale. The brush comes down again, light as a perching butterfly.
It moves gracefully, gliding in a colorful strip. The bristles are too wet to tickle. The pigment, drying in the brush’s wake, feels heavy more than itchy: like the weight of a finger that remains on me as she moves along, tracing the next inch of my chest or shoulder or stomach or thigh.
I try to hold still, but sometimes, as she goes over a waiting curve or into a sensitive hollow, I shiver at the sensation. She breathes out an mmm and redoes her mark. Or she sighs, not entirely in frustration, and leaves it, going on to the next thing.
On the sheet, paint drops splatter and spread as if a rainbow has fallen along with rain. Dips and drips of color. And on me…
She paints symbols in a new language, dots and arcs and sweeping dashes.
Spirals within squares and triangles filled with concentric circles, all enclosed by bigger coils and more complicated polygons.
They lead each look into a maze, deeper and deeper until the seeker becomes lost, enclosed in a pattern felt as much as seen.
For now, of course, with the mirror behind me, I don’t see it; I follow what she does with my flesh, not my eyes.
But I remember what I’ve looked like the last few times she’s done this.
An increasingly elaborate, increasingly bright masterpiece.
Now and then she switches colors for a new shape or curve.
When the feathery brush can’t quite do what she wants, she uses a fingertip to sketch just the right shape on my body.
As the unpredictable patterns absorb me, I get better at holding still.
When she nudges me to rise up on one side so she can fill in the space between my shoulder blades, crisscross my spine, my only reactions are soft gasps and slow sighs.
I won’t disturb her work. Even though the stroking above the cleft of my behind seems designed to make me squirm.
I’ve learned this paint, iridescent and impermanent, will wash off with water, or even with sweat (I still hold still, resisting the temptation to work up a sweat), and with other bodily juices, too. I’ll miss them when they’re gone, but already I can’t wait for the ones she’ll try next.
My back arches, my body lifting to meet her brush as it comes around me in electric dance.
When the tracks it leaves are washed away, I’ll still feel their echo.
Every part of me that can grow rigid, filled with blood and arousal—nipples, groin, even what seems to be my heart in my throat—is aching with it.
She paints zigzags, lightning, zebra stripes across my thighs. But not between them. Hair grows dense there, a thicket of the natural amid her art.
Not five feet away from us, another canvas lies on the floor, a real one.
She puts them there so she can work in a comfortable position, reclining over them, and because it ensures she won’t forget to finish the piece—you can’t abandon what’s right under your feet.
Except she has abandoned it this evening, forsaken it for me.
For my body spread out on this sheet, my legs parting, lifting the sex I can’t help but push up, offering to her brush though I know that’s not what she will take it with.
My heaving sides and thrown-back head, my hair growing matted with paint.
My silent straining when motion and color have taken all my words.
She creates the kind of thing that belongs in galleries, museums, something for the ages. But today, she creates me. With paint that will be washed away in an hour and which I will demand—not forever, I’m not yet ready to admit that—but again, again, and again.