Ink and Brine

Emily stared at the wrist tattoo while the ink gun hummed on the counter next to her. The little wave on her wrist, done in blackwork with Jordan's initials hidden inside the curl, had been blue-black for years and now looked faded and gray, like something left out in the sun too long. Six months since the breakup and the thing was still there, and she was pretty sure the fading wasn't just a trick of the fluorescent light.

She was twenty-eight years old, working the smallest tattoo parlor on the smallest ship she'd ever worked on, and she still couldn't figure out why she'd said yes to the gig. Athens to Valletta, ten days, one shop wedged between a duty-free store and an empty observation deck. The pay was fine. The passengers were fine. It was the being stuck on a boat with nothing but her own thoughts that was starting to grate.

"You gonna stare at that thing all day or you gonna wipe it down?" Matt said from the doorway. He was the barkeep, thirty years old and on his tenth year at sea, and he'd taken to stopping by the Inkwell on slow afternoons to gossip. He had a towel over one shoulder and a look on his face like he already knew something she didn't.

"It's fading," she said. "The whole thing. Which is weird, because I did it myself and I do good work."

"Maybe it knows something you don't," Matt said. He dropped into the client chair and spun it once. "You could always get it covered. I know a guy."

"You're looking at the guy."

"Right." He grinned. "Anyway. Slow day?"

"Dead. You'd think the fifth day of a cruise would mean somebody wants a souvenir anchor by now."

"Somebody will." He stood and stretched. "You hear about the first mate yet? Slocum?"

Emily shook her head. She'd seen the woman at the crew orientation, tall and broad-shouldered with dark hair and a face that looked younger than her rank. Thirty-two, the paperwork said. First mate, seven years on this ship, which was a long time on one boat.

"People say she's weird," Matt said. "Not bad weird. Private weird. She's been on this tub seven years and nobody's ever been in her cabin. Not once."

"That's just being an introvert, Matt."

"Sure. Or she's got a body in there." He waved and headed out. "Send business my way if anybody wants a drink before their tattoo. I get commission."

She laughed and went back to staring at the wrist.

* * *

The afternoon passed the way most of them did. Two passengers came in for small pieces, a woman who wanted a lighthouse and a man who wanted his daughter's name in script, and Emily did both without thinking much about it. By four o'clock the shop was empty again and the light through the porthole had gone flat and gray, the color of the sea outside, which was flat and gray too.

That was when the door opened and the first mate came in.

Bette Slocum closed the door behind her, which Emily noted, because nobody else did that. Passengers wandered in and out all day and the door stayed open. Bette stood there a moment, hands at her sides, like a person working up to something.

"Hi," she said. "You're the artist. Rosen."

"That's me. Looking to get inked?"

"I'm looking to ask a strange question first." Bette glanced at the door again. "Can I sit?"

"Sure."

She sat in the client chair and folded her hands in her lap, and up close Emily could see she had pale eyes, almost gray, and skin that looked like she never quite dried off. Not sweaty. Just a kind of shine, like someone who lived somewhere humid.

"My question is this," Bette said. "Have you ever tattooed something that wasn't entirely human skin?"

Emily blinked. "I've tattooed a lot of scars. Grafts. Old burns. That kind of thing."

"Not the same question."

"No," Emily admitted. "Not the same question."

Bette nodded slowly, like she'd expected that. She reached into her jacket pocket and set something on the counter. It was a small glass vial, maybe three inches tall, stoppered with wax, and the liquid inside was dark but not black. It caught the porthole light and threw it back wrong, a faint blue-green shimmer moving through it even though the vial was sitting still.

"What is that?" Emily asked. She didn't reach for it. Some part of her, some old animal part, said don't touch it yet.

"Seal-ink," Bette said. "Real seal-ink. Not the stuff they sell in craft stores." She paused. "I need to tell you something, and I'd rather you hear it sitting down."

"I am sitting down."

"Good." Bette took a breath. "I'm a selkie. The seal-skin's tucked away safe, and I'm the woman shape right now, and I've been carrying this around in my pocket for about four years waiting to find an artist I trusted enough to say it out loud."

Emily looked at her. Then at the vial. Then back at her. The reasonable thing, the sane thing, was to laugh and tell the first mate to get out of her shop. But Bette's face had that shine to it, and her hands were absolutely still in her lap, and something about the way she'd said tucked away safe made Emily think of the wave on her own wrist fading like it was ashamed to exist.

"Selkie," Emily said. "Seal woman. Skin comes off, you walk around on land, that whole thing."

"That whole thing."

"You're telling me this on a cruise ship in the middle of the Ionian Sea."

"There's a reason for that." Bette leaned forward a little. "The ink glows. Not party-glow, not fluorescent paint. It glows like the water does at thirty fathoms down, and it only takes color on skin that's mine. The other kind. So I need an artist who can work on a surface that isn't entirely human skin, and who can keep her mouth shut about it, and I heard from the barber that you're the best ink she's seen in seven years of this ship."

"The barber told you that?"

"The barber tells me everything. People talk when they're in her chair." Bette slid the vial an inch closer. "I'm not asking you to decide right now. I'm asking if you'll think about it. The trade is the ink, which is worth more than anything you'll ever buy, for one piece of custom work and your discretion. No pressure. No tricks. If you say no, I walk out that door and you never see me in here again."

Emily picked up the vial. It was warm. That was the part that got her, somehow, that it was warm as a living thing. The shimmer inside moved when she tilted it, and for half a second she'd swear it formed a shape, something long and swimming, and then it was just liquid again.

"Why me?" she asked. "Seriously. You've been carrying this around four years and you walk into my shop on my fifth day?"

"Because you look like somebody who needed a strange question today," Bette said. "And because the barber says your hands are steady, and I've watched you work through the porthole from the deck, and your lines are clean." She stood up. "Think about it. I'm on the bridge most nights after eight if you want to talk."

She got to the door and stopped, one hand on the frame.

"One more thing," she said. "You don't have to believe me. That's the beauty of it. The ink will believe for you."

Emily sat with the vial for a long while after Bette left. She held it up to the porthole, tilted it, watched that blue-green light slide around inside like something breathing. Then she set it down, washed her hands, and opened the vial's wax stopper halfway before snapping it shut again.

"Nope," she said out loud, to nobody. "Not yet. Think first."

She thought. She thought about it through dinner, which she ate standing at the counter because the galley crew gave her funny looks when she took up a booth alone. She thought about it during a walk around the promenade deck, where the sea did its endless gray-green thing on both sides. She thought about it in the crew shower, where she scrubbed off the day's ink residue and stared at her own wrist.

The wave with Jordan's initials in the curl had gone gray six months ago. Not faded the way ink normally fades. It had just gone tired, like the color had drained out of it along with everything else. Her last appointment before this contract had been a birthday tattoo for her sister, and she'd done it fine, clean lines, good saturation, and she'd felt nothing. That was the part that scared her. A person who feels nothing at the needle is not a tattoo artist anymore. She's just a person operating a machine.

Bette Slocum had walked into her shop with a vial of impossible ink and asked for the strangest work Emily would ever do, and Emily's hands had wanted it the whole time Bette was talking. Her fingers had been twitching on the counter. That was the honest read of it.

So on the morning of the sixth day, she went up to the bridge.

Bette was there, of course. She stood over the chart table in her uniform, and when she saw Emily come through the door her whole face changed, just a little, like a lamp turned up one notch.

"Well?" she said.

"I'll do it," Emily said. "But on my terms. My shop, my hours, my setup. And if anything about this goes sideways, I want to be able to walk away with no hard feelings."

"That's fair," Bette said. "That's more than fair." She came around the chart table. "When?"

"Tonight. After my last appointment. Eight-ish."

"I'll be there."

Emily spent the afternoon doing a dolphin for a woman celebrating her fortieth birthday, and a compass rose on a man's calf. Decent work, steady work. Then she sent the man on his way, locked the front door, and flipped the sign, and started tearing down her station like she was prepping for surgery.

Fresh black gloves. Fresh needles. Every surface wiped twice. She laid out her cleanest tips and her finest liner, the one she saved for detail work, and then she sat down and looked at the vial.

It sat there looking back.

"Okay," she said. "Here goes nothing."

The wax cracked under her thumbnail. The smell came off it first, and she wasn't ready for it. It smelled like the deep ocean, cold and mineral, and under that something sweeter, almost like kelp but nicer, like the memory of kelp. She dipped the needle and watched the ink climb the tip, dark and alive, and it moved. Not like a liquid moves. Like a thing moves.

A knock at the door. Three raps, even and unhurried.

"Come in, it's open," Emily called, and pulled her gloves on.

Bette came in and shut the door behind her. She'd changed out of the uniform into a plain gray t-shirt and soft pants, and without the shoulder boards she looked broader somehow, bigger in the room. She looked at the open vial and something in her posture let go, a tension Emily hadn't even noticed until it left.

"You did it," Bette said.

"I said I would." Emily pointed at the client chair. "Sit. And then you're going to explain exactly what I'm working on, because I'm not needle-guessing my way through this."

Bette sat. Then she pulled the left side of her shirt down off her shoulder, and Emily understood, all at once, why the question had been worded the way it was.

The skin over Bette's left shoulder was not human skin. It was smooth, tighter than skin had any right to be, a deep slate gray shot through with faint darker mottling, and it looked warm. It looked like the pelt she'd only heard described in old stories, and it ran from the shoulder blade down across the meat of the upper arm and stopped at a clean line where ordinary skin began, like a shirt seam.

"Okay," Emily said, and her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Okay. That's real."

"That's real." Bette held still. "It's warm. It heals different. It moves different. That's why I needed you to know before you started."

Emily leaned in and looked without touching. The surface had almost no pore texture. It caught the light like polished stone, except softer. She pulled on a fresh glove and, with her ungloved hand hovering, asked, "Can I touch it? Just a fingertip, so I know what I'm working with."

"Go ahead."

It was warm. Warmer than human skin, warmer by a degree or two, and it gave under her finger like silk stretched over something alive. Which, she supposed, it was.

"You said it only takes color on this part," Emily said. "So we're staying inside the seam line."

"Inside the seam line. Exactly."

"What do you want on it?"

Bette was quiet a second. "A wave pattern. Something like the open water at night. Big swells, the kind you only see way out where there's no land. I've had the design in my head for four years and I couldn't draw it myself to save my life."

Emily got her tablet out and sketched while Bette talked. Long rolling curves, layered, the crests breaking into foam-work of tiny lines. Bette kept correcting her in a low voice, here the swell goes steeper, there the trough opens up, and after twenty minutes Emily had something on the screen that made Bette go still.

"That's it," Bette said. "That's exactly it. How did you."