The Last Rep

I locked the front door at nine. Turned the deadbolt, flipped the OPEN sign, and pulled the shade down hard. Thursdays in the industrial district are dead anyway, but I didn't want a face at the glass tonight.

The shop was just the hum of the sterilizer and the fridge in the back. I like that sound. Been listening to it for eleven years.

I went to the back room and adjusted the surgical light. It's a good light. Cost more than my first car. I swung it over the tattoo chair and checked the angle twice, which was stupid, because the angle was fine. I was stalling and I knew it.

Xander had been my apprentice for two years. He was thirty-one now, twenty-nine when he walked in asking if I took apprentices. He did. Barely. He'd been good from the start. Clean lines. Patient. Hungry, though. That's the word I keep coming back to. Hungry for something that proved he was real.

I knew that hunger. Had it myself at his age, minus the specifics. I got my first tattoo at twenty-two to spite my mother and it was a bad one. Xander deserved better than spite.

There was a knock at the front door. Soft. Two knuckles.

I went up front and there he was, hood up, looking like he might bolt.

"You locked it," he said through the glass.

"It's closed. That's kind of the point." I let him in. His hands were cold. I noticed that when I took his jacket, and I noticed I noticed, and it annoyed me.

"Is Meg coming?" he asked.

"She's doing a thing. She'll pop in later or she won't." Meg was thirty-six, my piercer, my best friend since tattoo school. Married to her wife eight years now. She knew what tonight was. She'd probably make an excuse and leave early, which was exactly the kind of discretion I didn't ask for and absolutely wanted.

"You nervous?" I asked him.

"A little." He stood by the front desk and didn't sit. "Been drawing this piece in my head for five years. Feels weird to hand it to somebody else, even you."

"Even me," I said. "Thanks."

"You know what I mean."

I did. I drew his design, though. His sketches, my stencil. We'd worked on it together over three Sundays. A phoenix, wings spread wide across the chest, following the scars. Two long lines under each pec. The wings rose out of them like that was the entire design, and honestly it was.

"Go on back," I said. "Get settled."

He went.

I gathered my supplies and took my time. Fresh needles. Ink caps. Vaseline. My machine, the heavy one, the one I only use for work that matters. I loaded black and a deep red and a burnt orange for the flames. I thought about the last time I did a free piece for someone. Never, actually. I thought about that.

In the back room Xander had stripped to the waist and was lying back in the chair, staring at the ceiling. His binder was off, folded on his shirt on the stool. His chest was flat from the surgery, three years old now, and the scars had faded to pale lines I'd tattooed around twice before, small work, touch-ups, nothing like tonight.

He ran a finger along one of them. Slow. Like he was reading it.

"First time I ever chickened out on a tattoo I was twenty-two," he said, without looking at me. "Same year I came out. Timing's funny."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. There was this walk-in shop near campus. My roommate dared me, basically. He dared me and I picked a design off the wall, some dumb tribal thing, and I sat down and the guy had the needle ready and I said wait." He laughed a little. "I said wait, and then I said never mind, and I paid him twenty bucks for wasting his time and walked out."

"Why'd you stop?"

"Because it wasn't mine." He turned his head and looked at me. "Some flash on a wall. It didn't mean anything. I wanted it to mean something and it didn't and I thought, that's a bad sign. If I can't feel it before it's on me, how's it going to feel after?"

"That's a smart twenty-two."

"It was a scared twenty-two." He stretched his arms over his head, giving me the whole canvas, and settled. "Three years ago I got the surgery. You know that. And every year since I thought, this is the year I put something over it. And every year I'd get to the shop and talk myself out of it again. Some girl behind the counter asking what I wanted and me going, uh, let me think about it."

"And then you got a boss who draws phoenixes," I said.

"And then I got a boss who drew me a phoenix." He smiled up at the light. "You know what today actually is? Five years to the day since I started T. The surgery came later, but the T came first. I keep them separate in my head. The shot was the start line. The surgery was the finish line. This tattoo is the trophy."

I set up beside him and pulled on gloves. Snapped them. He flinched at the snap, a small one, and grinned at himself for flinching.

"You can still back out," I said. "Twenty bucks and you can walk away."

"Shut up and draw, Kath."

I shaved the area, cleaned it, pressed the stencil. Big transfer paper, both hands, dead center. I smoothed it down and let it sit and he held still like he was holding his breath too.

Then I peeled it.

He sat up. Looked down. The phoenix sat on him in purple ink, wings wide, tail sweeping low across his ribs, flames licking up out of the scar lines. He was quiet a long time. I gave him that.

"God," he said finally. "It's so big."

"You asked for big."

"I know, but seeing it." He touched the edge of a wing with one fingertip, careful, like the ink was wet, which it wasn't, it was just a transfer. "It's like it was always supposed to be there and somebody finally traced the outline."

"That's the idea." I pulled the chair over and sat. "It follows you. I didn't fight the scars. I used them."

"I noticed." His voice went thick. He cleared his throat. "Okay. Yeah. Do it."

"You're sure?"

"Five years sure."

I bent to work. First line is always the worst one for the client, so I put it where it'd hurt least, up by the collarbone. The machine buzzed and he breathed through it, slow and even, better than most. Two years of watching him tattoo other people and I'd never been on this side of him. It felt different. Obviously it felt different.

He talked while I worked. He always talks when I work on him, can't help it. He told me about the ex, the serious one, the guy he dated from twenty-seven to twenty-nine. How the guy was fine with everything except the tattoo. Kept saying, why ruin it, why mark it up.

"He didn't get it," Xander said. "He kept saying, but you finally have the body you wanted, why cover it. Like the tattoo was going to cancel out the chest."

"What did you say?"

"I didn't say anything. That was the problem." He shifted a little under the needle. "I just filed it away and then three months later we broke up over something dumb and I realized the tattoo thing was part of the dumb thing."

I wiped ink and kept my hand steady. "He wanted you unmarked."

"He wanted me finished, I think. Like, done. Like I was a project and the surgery was the end of it and everything after was extra." He huffed. "I'm not a finished thing. Nobody is."

No, I thought. Nobody is.

I worked the wing outline for an hour. He was quiet through most of it. At some point Meg's car pulled up out front, I heard the door, and she came in the back way with a paper bag of donuts and a six-pack of root beer because she's Meg.

"Oh my god," she said, looking at his chest. "Kath. Oh my god!"

"Stencil looks good wet," I said.

"It looks better than that." She set the bag down and just stared. "Xander, honey, that's the best thing she's ever done and I've watched her work twelve years."

"Don't jinx me," I said.

She stayed for twenty minutes, ate a donut, made Xander show her the design printouts, and then she did exactly what I figured she'd do. Squeezed my shoulder, said she had to call her wife, and went out to sit in her car.

The door clicked shut behind her.

Xander looked at me over the machine. "She's not calling her wife."

"No," I said. "She's being a good friend."

The shop went quiet again. Just the machine and the fridge and him breathing under my hands. I wiped a line clean and started the next one and thought about how long I wanted to look at this chest, and how long was not a professional answer, and I put my head down and kept the line steady.

There was a lot of night left.

The first pass of the needle made him gasp. Not loud. Just a sharp little pull of air through his teeth, right over the sternum where the skin is thin and the bone is close.

"Bad spot?" I asked.

"No. Just. Felt it more than I thought."

"Breathe out."

He breathed out. I put my free hand on his shoulder to brace him, thumb on the collarbone, fingers curled around the top of the delt. Standard hold. I do it on every client, keeps them from jumping. But my hand stayed there between lines. Sat on his skin while the machine was off and I was dipping ink. He didn't say anything about it. I didn't move it.

The flame work went in slow. Orange and red layered over the black, and every time the needle crossed a scar line he'd tense and I'd feel it come up through my palm and then let go. His scars are pale now, three years healed, thin lines under each pec where the surgeon did good work. I'd tattooed around them twice before. Small stuff. A touch-up on the swallow on his hip, a band of dots on the ribs. Never anything like this. Never anything that needed my whole hand flat on his chest to keep him still.

"Talk to me," he said around ninety minutes in. "I'm getting weird in my head."

"About what?"

"Nothing. Everything. Been waiting five years for this and now I'm lying here like it's a dentist appointment."

"It's normal. Big pieces do that. You spend all this time wanting it and then it's happening and your brain can't catch up."

"Yeah." He exhaled. "That."

"Want me to talk instead? I can tell you about my divorce."

"Kath."

"What, it's riveting. Man left me for a woman who goes to bed at ten. I still think about her sleep schedule more than I think about him."

He laughed and the laugh moved his chest under my hand and I lifted it, wiped, put it back. There. Professional again.

I did the tail last before the break. It sweeps low across his ribs and he flinched there for real, grabbed the armrest, hissed one word I won't repeat. I stopped the machine.

"Break."

"Thank god!"

I sat back and pulled my gloves off finger by finger and he lay there with his chest half purple and half black and half red, which is three halves, whatever, that's what it looked like. I got him a root beer from Meg's six-pack and cracked it for him because his hands were shaky.

"Thanks." He drank half of it in one go. "God."

"You're doing good. Better than I did on my ribs."

"You cried on your ribs."

"I did not cry. My eyes watered. Occupational hazard."

He laughed again. Then the laugh faded out and he looked down at himself and got quiet, and I know that quiet. That's the quiet where somebody's deciding whether to say the thing.

"Can I say something dumb?" he said.

"You've been saying dumb things all night."

"Worse than usual." He turned the bottle in his hands. "During sex, I've never. Nobody's ever seen my chest. During sex. Ever."

I didn't answer right away. I put the cap back on the ink and set it in the tray and bought myself a second that way.

"Even the serious guy?" I said.

"Especially him. Lights off, shirt on. He never asked and I never offered and after a while it just became the rule and I stopped noticing it was a rule." He shrugged, and the shrug pulled at the fresh lines and he winced. "Five years on T, three years out from surgery, and I've had sex exactly one way. In the dark, covered up. Like I'm still hiding something that isn't there anymore."

"That's not dumb."

"It's a little dumb."

"It's not." I sat on the stool next to the chair, elbows on knees. "For what it's worth, I've never tattooed anybody with the lights this low, either, and I've never done a piece this personal for somebody I. For my apprentice."

"That was going somewhere interesting, I think."

"Shut up." I rubbed my eyes with the back of my wrist, careful of the ink on my fingers. "The point is I get it. The rule thing. I had my own rules for two years with the ex. No sleepovers past midnight. Never let him see me before coffee. Stupid little walls I built so high I forgot they were there, and then one day he's gone and I'm thirty-four and the walls are still up and there's nobody on the other side of them."

"Kath."

"I'm just saying I get it. That's all."

He was quiet. I looked at his chest because I was checking the lines, that was the reason, that's the reason I'd give anybody who asked. The black had taken clean.