Chapter 8
Harper had been to Savannah eleven times in her life, but she had never done anything spontaneous there.
She had gone to Savannah for conferences, mostly, or client dinners, once for a long weekend with Jordan several years ago, where she’d spent half the time answering work emails from the bathroom of her hotel on East Bay Street while he sat on the balcony and read a novel, pretending not to notice.
She had walked the squares and eaten at good restaurants, and she had admired the architecture the way you look at a painting in a museum, from a respectful distance.
Today, she was getting a tattoo.
This was her pick for month five, and she had chosen it because it was the kind of thing Harper Ellis did not do. You see, Harper Ellis wore silk blouses and expensive heels that cost more than some people’s rent.
Harper Ellis signed contracts with a Montblanc pen.
Harper Ellis did not sit in a chair and allow an inked-up stranger to put a needle in her skin. She didn’t do permanent things to her body except for the occasional nip or tuck that needed to happen. That was just a necessity.
And this was exactly why she had to do it, because the whole point of this pact was to scare herself, and the thing that scared Harper most was not the pain or the needles, not even the permanence.
It was the loss of control.
It was the idea of marking her body with something she could not take back, could not negotiate, and could not delete from her calendar.
Something permanent from a woman who kept everyone at arm’s length so she’d never have to commit to anything she couldn’t walk away from.
She kept that particular insight to herself.
They had driven down together, two hours from Beaufort, taking the back roads through the Lowcountry because Claire said they were prettier, and they were. The Lowcountry was one of the most beautiful places on earth as far as Harper was concerned, and she’d been just about everywhere.
The longer drive was also because they needed the extra time for Nina to talk herself into this, which she eventually did.
The March air, warm through the open windows, carried the decaying smell of the marsh in early spring. It was a smell that was hard to describe to others and very specific to the Lowcountry.
The live oaks along Highway 17 made a tunnel of green and shadow that felt like driving through a cathedral.
“Savannah makes me want to sit on a bench and do nothing for hours,” Nina said.
“Yep, that’s the Savannah effect,” Claire said. “It slows you down whether you want it to or not.”
“Well, I suppose I could use some slowing down,” Harper said, surprising all three of them, because Harper had never expressed a desire to move at any speed below the maximum in her life.
The parlor was on a side street near Chippewa Square in a narrow brick building with a green door, and it was named Tidewater Ink.
It looked less like a tattoo shop and more like a bookstore that had changed its mind, which is probably why Harper had chosen it.
She had spent hours reading reviews, comparing portfolios, and even evaluating the cleanliness ratings of seven different tattoo parlors before choosing this one, because even if Harper was being spontaneous, she was going to be thorough about it.
Inside, the walls were exposed brick covered in framed flash art and photographs of finished work. The floors were old hardwood, scuffed but clean. Music played from a speaker behind the counter. It was something acoustic.
The air smelled like clean soap and the faintest trace of cigar smoke from the smoke shop next door. The whole place had a calm, steady energy that felt more like a doctor’s office than a den of reckless decisions.
A woman appeared from behind a curtain. She looked like she was probably around forty, with short silver hair and full sleeves of floral tattoos on both arms.
“Harper?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s me.”
“I’m Wren. We talked on the phone.”
She looked at Claire and Nina.
“So is it all three of you?”
“All three of us,” Claire said, nervousness obvious in her voice. This wasn’t something Claire would’ve ever suggested.
Wren smiled. She had probably seen this a million times before.
Women of a certain age walking through her door with a mixture of determination and abject terror, about to do something they never thought they would do.
“First tattoos?”
“For me,” Claire said. “I’ve never even had my ears pierced twice.”
“I have a little one,” Nina said. “A tiny hummingbird on my shoulder blade. David drew it for me.” She said it very matter-of-factly, the way she had been saying David’s name more and more lately. With love, that didn’t sound like she was absolutely drowning.
Harper nodded her head.
“First.”
“Okay then,” Wren said. “Let’s talk about what you all want.”
They all agreed on matching tattoos, but not on what the matching tattoo should be.
This had been the constant subject of the group chat, spanning two weeks and fifty-three messages.
Claire had suggested they all get a magnolia because, well, she was Claire.
Harper said they needed something geometric and abstract because, well, she was Harper.
Nina said they needed a compass, and they’d almost gone with it until Claire pointed out that a compass implied you were lost, which, while arguably accurate, was not the message she wanted permanently etched on her body.
It was Nina who had finally settled it about three days ago with a text that arrived at almost midnight.
A wave, simple, small, signifies the ocean, signifies the Lowcountry, the way the water keeps moving even when everything else feels still. And then nobody argued with it.
Wren sketched it for them, a tiny, clean wave, no bigger than a quarter, delicate enough to be subtle yet distinct enough to be unmistakable.
She showed them the design on tracing paper, and all three of them leaned over the counter to look at it. Harper felt a tightness in her throat. She didn’t entirely understand it. It was just a wave, a tiny drawing of water.
It shouldn’t have made her emotional, and yet here she was, standing in a tattoo parlor in Savannah, looking at a drawing the size of a coin and feeling like she was about to do something that mattered so much in a way she simply couldn’t articulate.
“Where do you want it?” Wren asked.
Harper didn’t hesitate. “Inside of my wrist.”
Claire and Nina both looked at her. The wrist was very visible.
The wrist was where clients, colleagues, and even her mother would see it, but Harper was choosing it anyway.
“Ankle,” Claire said, “inside and near the bone.”
Hidden, of course, because Claire would choose hidden.
Nina wanted to say something, but she stopped and then looked at Wren.
“Can you add initials to mine, like tiny ones next to the wave?”
“Of course, what initials?”
“D-A-V. David Alejandro Vargas.”
Wren wrote the letters below the wave on Nina’s sketch in a script so small and delicate it looked like the ocean was just whispering his name.
“Perfect,” Nina said.
Claire went first because even though she was the most nervous, she believed that going first was just getting it over with. And getting it over with was the way that Claire moved through life without losing her mind.
She sat in the chair with focused intensity, as if undergoing a medical procedure, which was not entirely wrong.
Wren cleaned the spot on her inner ankle, put the stencil on, and picked up the machine. Claire grabbed Nina’s hand so hard that Nina actually winced.
“How much have you done?” Claire asked, staring at the ceiling.
“Um, I haven’t started yet,” Wren said, laughing.
“Oh.”
The needle touched her skin, and Claire made a sound like a polite person being electrocuted. She gripped Nina’s hand even tighter. Her jaw locked. Her eyes remained on the ceiling as if she were waiting for angels to come down and take her to the clouds.
“Breathe,” Wren said calmly.
Claire breathed.
The needle hummed, and Harper watched from the next chair.
Claire Morrison, who organized napkins and baked pound cake and counted to three before speaking to her own husband, was sitting in a chair, allowing a stranger to permanently mark her body.
She was obviously terrified and doing it anyway. It only took about twelve minutes. When Wren finished, she wiped it clean and held up a mirror.
Claire looked at the small wave on her ankle, and a small smile appeared on her face. She was looking at the first thing she had really done for herself in twenty-six years that nobody had asked her to do or needed her to do.
It existed purely because she had chosen it.
“It’s so tiny,” Claire said.
“It’s all yours,” Wren said.
Nina went next. She was very calm in the chair, actually calmer than anyone expected. The needle traced the wave, then the initials. Nina watched the whole thing, eyes watching the ink go into her skin.
When Wren finished, Nina ran her thumb gently over the bandage.
“He’s going to be on me forever now.”
“He was always with you,” Harper said. “Now it’s just visible on your skin.”
Then it was Harper’s turn. She sat in the chair. Wren cleaned the inside of her left wrist, the place where her pulse lived, and Harper watched the stencil go on.
She thought about the careful, controlled decisions, every careful, controlled decision she’d made in her last twenty years. The career that she’d built. The apartment with no kitchen table.
The man she’d pushed away because loving him meant needing him, and needing someone was definitely a liability she couldn’t afford.
The needle started. It hurt, but not in the way Harper had expected. It was a bit sharp and specific, a focused kind of pain, but Harper found that she actually didn’t mind it.
She had spent so long avoiding discomfort of any kind that the honest sting of the needle felt almost like relief. The pain meant that something was happening.
She watched the wave appear on her wrist, small and permanent. When Wren was finished, Harper held her wrist up to the light.