Prologue #2
She bit her lip and removed her shoes. She was wearing tights, so she removed those too.
She had long legs, pale but exquisitely muscled.
The man took no notice. All the women he worked on were like this.
Innocent and perfectly formed. More importantly, they were unblemished.
No tattoos, no scars, only their ears pierced.
The woman climbed onto the table. The man took a seat, then rolled it towards the bottom of the table. He pulled his workstation within easy reach.
‘I have a couple of things to do, then we’ll get started,’ he said.
The first thing was the ink. He slotted nine ink cups into the tilted stand and filled each one with a rich red ink.
Next he picked up a pipette of black ink.
Squeezed a drop into the first cup, two into the second, three into the third and four into the fourth.
He stirred the cups and studied the different shades of red.
Satisfied, he repeated the process with the next four cups, although this time he added white ink.
He left the cup at the end untouched. The nine cups now each contained a slightly different shade of red, from pink to dark burgundy.
He opened an organ transfer box and pulled out a single vial. He showed it to the woman.
‘You know what this is?’ he asked.
She nodded. ‘It’s blood.’
‘That’s right. It’s been tested and it’s quite safe. There is no need to worry.’
He picked up an empty pipette and filled it with blood from the vial. He added five drops to each of the nine ink cups. He didn’t know why he was required to do this, nor did he know where the blood had come from.
He certainly wasn’t going to ask.
It was symbolic anyway; the blood didn’t affect the ink’s colour.
He picked up his next-generation high-performance tattoo machine.
It was wireless, and had an inbuilt vibration-dampening mechanism.
It was the most advanced machine on the market.
He had trained with one of the old ‘guns’, a vibrating, noisy, white-finger-inducing beast of a thing.
Just ten minutes on the gun had left him with numb hands and a tingle up his arm.
He could hold his new machine for as long as he had ink.
He slotted a needle into the machine. It was a one-round liner.
A single needle he’d use for the outline and for anything intricate.
He’d switch to a seven-mag soft-edge shader – two rows of seven needles – for texture and shading.
He had other, more specialised needles, but he doubted he would need them.
Many years ago, when he’d worked part-time to supplement his studies and his extracurricular peccadillos, he’d have shaved the body part he was tattooing. Applied a barrier agent and affixed the transfer.
He was not that tattooist any more. Hadn’t been for over thirty years. He no longer used transfers. All his tattoos were freehand. And there was no need to shave the body part. The soles of the feet were hairless.
There were lots of nerve endings, though.
‘Are you ready?’ he asked.
The woman nodded.
He flicked a switch and the tattoo machine hummed into life. He held the woman’s foot with his left hand. Gentle but firm. He dipped the needle into the middle cup, then got to work.
The woman didn’t flinch. She didn’t cry out.
She remained motionless as the needle pierced the sole of her foot three thousand times a minute.
Through the constantly regenerating epidermis and into the permanent dermis.
Each time the needle left the skin, it left behind a tiny amount of rich red ink.
On its own, the single ink-filled hole was as relevant as a single pixel on a 5K television. But after a while, an image had formed.
The man switched needles. Twisted off the one-round liner and fitted the seven-mag shader. Added shadow and texture. Kept glancing up as he turned the one-dimensional drawing into a three-dimensional work of art.
A portrait.
A woman’s face. Her eyes were downcast, submissive. Her expression was open and inviting, yet demure and reserved. The hint of a smile, no more than a flicker, played on her lips.
The man spent a further hour refining the tattoo. A bit of shading here, a darker line there.
Dotting the i’s; crossing the t’s.
When he was satisfied, he leaned back and studied the tattoo. He smiled. He thought this was his best work yet, and they’d all been exceptional. It was why he would never be allowed to leave.
‘Do you want to see it?’ he asked the woman.
‘I do.’
He picked up a magnified mirror. Held it so she could see the sole of her right foot. And then she smiled too.
She said nothing for almost a minute. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she murmured eventually.
The man nodded. ‘I draw what I see.’
The woman couldn’t tear her eyes away from the image in the mirror.
He’d perfectly captured her dimples – her ‘cheeky’ dimples, her mom used to call them – and her uneven front teeth.
And he’d only used red. Red and shades of red.
She didn’t know much about tattoos, and even less about portrait art, but she knew she was looking at an extraordinary piece of work.
That it was smaller in diameter than a can of soda was even more impressive. So much detail in such a small tattoo.
‘How can I ever repay you?’ she asked.
‘We’ll never see each other again.’
The woman nodded. She knew that to be true. She and her tattoo were going away now. To a new life. A better life.
‘You’ll be taken from here to a private residence,’ the man said. ‘You’ll stay there until the tattoo is fully healed. Until then you won’t be allowed to stand, or bathe.’
‘For how long?’
He shrugged. ‘That depends on how fast you heal. For some it’s a couple of weeks, others a bit longer. Don’t be tempted to rush the natural process. If you pick the scabs, you’ll end up with scars, and scars distort the image. And you know what happens then?’
She did.
He removed his glove and washed his hands. Tapped out a text to the nurse. Five minutes later, there was a knock on the door. He unlocked it and let the nurse in. He was pushing a wheelchair, the leg ramp already raised.
‘This man is going to dress your wound,’ the tattooist explained to the woman. ‘Do as he says.’
They helped her into the chair.
The tattooist took a deep breath. ‘Why the blood?’ he asked.
The nurse glared at him and didn’t answer.
As they left the room, the woman looked back; the nurse didn’t.
The man locked the door behind them and began to gather his photographs and stencils.
His notes, his colour plans. It was what he did.
He studied his subject for months. Drew her image until he was doing it in his sleep.
Then once the tattoo was finished, everything went into a desk incinerator.
No records. It was as if she’d never existed.
Although he would never see the woman again, and he never even knew her name, he did what he’d done with all the women he’d tattooed – he wished her well.
Because in his mind at least, she had existed.
All he could do was hope his tattoo would give her the best possible start in her new life. He thought it might.
The man was right.
But he was also wrong.
And that was because he didn’t know that for the women, their tattoos were the mark of Cain.
The nurse took the newly tattooed woman straight to the Surgeon.
Capital S. It was his name as well as his profession.
He wasn’t a real surgeon, of course. No one who enjoyed inflicting pain as much as he did could pass the stringent psych evaluations to get into medical school.
But where there’s a will there’s a way, and he now travelled the world performing two specific procedures.
He enjoyed them both and thought it was a good compromise.
‘Do you understand why I must do this?’ the Surgeon asked the woman.
The woman shuddered. She didn’t like this man. He wasn’t kind like the tattooist. ‘Yes,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m told it’s necessary. For my own protection.’
The Surgeon nodded. He and the nurse helped the woman onto the operating table. He scrubbed up, then the nurse handed him a scalpel.
‘Be brave,’ the Surgeon told the woman. ‘This is going to hurt, but not for long. Nod when you’re ready.’
The woman gritted her teeth and clamped shut her eyes. She nodded.
The Surgeon leaned in with his scalpel.
And sliced off some of her hair.