After Hours Ink

My name is Darrell, I'm fifty-two years old, and on the night this happened I had been running my own shop for exactly six months, which felt like both a lifetime and about forty minutes depending on how the evening was going. Midnight Ink sat on a side street between a laundromat and the back entrance of St. Ambrose Hospital, and the landlord loved telling anyone who would listen that the tattoo trade was recession proof, which was easy for him to say since he was not the one paying his rent.

It was a Saturday in October, dusk coming early, and I was setting up my station the way I always did, laying out needles, filling ink caps, wiping the armrest down twice even though nobody had touched it since the night before. The shop was quiet enough that I could hear the refrigerator in the back room cycling on and off, and outside the window the hospital lot had its steady trickle of cars sliding in under the sodium lights. I put my phone face down on the counter because I had caught myself checking it again, hoping for nothing in particular, which was a bad habit I had picked up after Lena moved out.

Lena and I had been together eleven years, most of them good, and then last winter she told me she was done, kindly, gently, the way you tell someone a terminal diagnosis, and I sat with that for a few months before deciding the only sane response was to blow up my whole professional life too. My old partner Rupert and I had shared a parlor downtown for fourteen years, and it was a good arrangement right up until it wasn't, and after the breakup I found I couldn't stand the sight of the old shop anymore, so I signed a lease on this dump and called it a fresh start. Six months in, the fresh start had brought me a grand total of nine walk-in customers for the week, four of whom just wanted their ears pierced and got annoyed when I told them I didn't do that.

So I was doing the math again, the rent math, the one where I divide what's in the business account by what I owe and get a number I don't like, when the door chimed and a woman came in on a gust of cold air. She was twenty-seven or thereabouts, dark hair cut short at the jaw, hospital scrubs under a quilted jacket, an ID badge clipped to her hip that flipped around as she looked at me.

"Oh my god, you're actually open," she said, already unwinding her scarf. "I've been walking past this place for a few weeks wondering if it was even real."

"It's real," I said. "Barely, some nights, but real."

She held up her badge, and it read Aki, Orderly, St. Ambrose Emergency. "I just got off a double and I was hoping you had the coffee machine. The old guy who had this space before you had a monster of a coffee maker, and the hospital break room only has that pod machine that tastes like hot cardboard."

I laughed, because she was right about pod machines, and I pointed at the ancient Bunn in the corner that had come with the lease. "That thing survived the previous tenant, two previous tenants actually, and it still makes coffee that'll take the paint off your ribs. I'm Darrell."

"Aki," she said, and we shook hands, her grip firm and her palm a little cold from the walk over. While I poured two cups she drifted around the front of the shop, reading the flash on the walls, pausing at the portfolio binder lying open on the counter where I had been showing it to a customer earlier that afternoon.

"You want cream or anything?" I asked, and she said sure, whatever I had, and then she was leaning over the binder with her coffee cup balanced on the glass counter, turning pages with one careful finger.

"Is this your work?" she asked, and I told her it was, all of it, the last two years of it anyway. She went slower after that, really looking, and I don't mind saying it was nice to be looked at like that by somebody who seemed to actually see the work and not just glance at it the way most people do.

"This hummingbird one," she said after a while, tapping a piece I had done on a woman's shoulder blade back in the summer. "The line work on the wing is insane. How long did that take?"

"About four hours over two sittings," I said. "Birds are unforgiving, because everybody knows what a wing looks like, so you can't fake the structure."

"I've thought about getting one," she said, and then she got quiet, turning another page, and I waited because it seemed like there was more coming. She took a sip of coffee and made a small face, the kind you make at bad coffee that you're drinking anyway. "I never have, though. Partly money, partly time, but partly I worry about how my skin would take it."

"What do you mean, take it?" I asked, and I kept my voice easy, because I could tell she was choosing her words.

She turned to face me, and she had that look people get when they're deciding whether to explain something to a stranger. "I'm trans," she said. "I transitioned a few years back, I started hormones when I was twenty-two, and my skin has changed a lot since then. It's softer, it scars differently than it used to, and I've read a bunch of stuff online, some of it good and some of it terrifying, about tattoos on hormone-altered skin, whether the ink holds, whether it heals weird, whether it blows out." She shrugged. "So I keep putting it off."

"Well, the internet is half idiots and half advertisers," I said, and she laughed, a real laugh, quick and bright. "Most of what's true is boring. Tattooed skin is wounded skin, and your body heals a wound the way it heals, and the ink either holds or it doesn't, and mostly it holds. What I'd want to know is anything specific about your skin, do you scar badly, do you keloid, that kind of thing, and if there's a real question we do a test spot first. A small piece somewhere out of the way, we let it heal a couple months, and then we know instead of guessing."

She was looking at me with an expression I couldn't quite read, something between surprise and suspicion, and then she said, "That's the first sensible answer I've ever gotten to that question. Usually people either get weird or they just say it'll be fine and change the subject."

"I've been doing this thirty years," I said. "I've tattooed every kind of skin there is, and skin that used to be a different kind, and the answer is always the same, which is we go slow and we pay attention and we don't guess."

It was fully dark outside by then, and the hospital lot had gone still, and I looked at the clock on the wall and saw it was barely nine, with eight more hours of an empty shop ahead of me. She checked her phone and made a face. "I'm off till Monday and nowhere I want to be except somewhere that isn't my empty apartment," she said. "Is it a bother if I stay and look at this binder? I'll buy another coffee."

"Sit down," I said, dragging a stool around to my side of the counter. "The coffee's free and the night's dead anyway. You'd be doing me a favor."

She sat and we both drank the bad coffee and she went back through the binder slower the second time, and I found myself doing something I almost never do with walk-ins, which is talking. Maybe it was the dead night, maybe it was that she asked real questions instead of asking how much, but somewhere around the third cup I heard myself saying, "So if you don't mind my asking, since we're on the subject, are you still on hormones, or is that finished?"

She looked up from the binder, and I was ready to apologize, because guys my age don't always ask things right even when we mean well, but she didn't look annoyed, she looked interested. "Still on," she said. "I'll be on them the rest of my life, probably. Estradiol, and an anti-androgen. Why, does it matter for the tattoo?"

"Could be," I said. "It matters the way anything about your body matters, blood thinning, healing speed, how your skin holds moisture. Estrogen changes skin texture, and it changes how you scar, which you already know better than I do. So I'd want to know where you are with it, because a girl who started last year and a girl who's five years settled are two different customers." I tore a paper towel off the roll and wiped a smudge of ink off the counter while I talked, an old habit. "It's not a big deal. It's just the kind of thing a good artist asks and a lazy one doesn't."

She was quiet a second, turning her coffee cup in her hands, and then she said, "Five years settled, give or take. Started at twenty-two, I'm twenty-seven now. My levels have been steady for a while. And my skin, honestly, it heals fine, better than fine, I used to scrape myself all the time hauling patients around at work and it was never a problem." She smiled a little sideways. "I can't believe you knew to ask about any of that. Most people, and I mean most people, find out I'm trans and suddenly they're either a doctor or a priest or they can't make eye contact."

"Well, I'm none of those," I said. "I'm a guy who's been putting ink under skin since before you were born, and skin is my whole job, so I pay attention to it. My ex, Lena, she was a nurse, and she used to say half of medicine is just knowing which questions are boring and asking them anyway." I hadn't meant to bring Lena up, it had been eleven years and then one winter and then done, and I don't usually hand her name to strangers, but it slipped out easy and didn't hurt going out, which surprised me.

Aki laughed. "Your ex sounds smarter than my last two boyfriends put together." Then she got this look, the kind of look I imagine I get when I'm about to talk myself into something, and she said, "So hypothetically, if your skin has changed, how would a person even find out if the ink holds? Would you have to, like, test a spot? On actual skin?" She stuck her ankle out from under the stool and wiggled it at me. "Feel free to test a spot on mine, is what I'm saying, purely in the interest of science."

I laughed, because it was a joke and a good one, and then I stopped laughing, because I looked at her ankle and looked at the clock and looked at the empty shop, and the idea arrived whole, the way ideas do when you've been alone too much and somebody finally walks in. "You know what," I said, "I'd actually do it. Free. A little bird, something small, nothing you'd have to explain to anybody, on the outside of the ankle where it's easy to keep an eye on while it heals. We watch how the ink takes and how it settles over a couple months, and if it heals clean, you come back someday for the real piece and we both know what we're working with. And if it doesn't, I've learned something and you're out nothing."

She stared at me. "You'd tattoo me for free."

"Purely professional," I said, holding up both hands. "Research. I've got eight dead hours and a shop that needs a reason to exist, and you've got skin I'm professionally curious about. It's