Saturday's Storyteller: "It was the ugliest tattoo she had ever gotten and she loved it."

by Belinda Roddie

It was the ugliest tattoo she had ever gotten and she loved it.

Not that the other tattoos were much better. Some people did actually have taste in art and aesthetics. Any regular fool who knew how to decorate a house with the proper patterns and colors knew when a painting or a design was bound to fall flat on its fresh acrylic oily face. But for Gwendolyn, it was like color blindness taken to the entire visual spectrum.

Gwen had gotten her first tattoo when she was eighteen, and just turned eighteen, two hours after the analog time on her birth certificate. The wretched looking butterfly with the broken-looking wings was still melting on her back to this day, and it looked more and more like purple-pink candle wax with each passing year. On both arms, she had gone for smiley faces stars with big, drooping red tongues - like a celestial ":P" emoticon on her skin instead of a cellphone screen. They were Chinese characters that claimed her babies would be ugly on her right shoulder (she thought it said she was a free spirit), a Bible verse on her thigh (from Leviticus, no less), a blue heart right in the center of her left buttock (that was starting to look particularly heinous with impending flab). She even had a rainbow streaking across her stomach, which had had enough curly fries digesting in it for twenty years.

But this tattoo was a real kick in the teeth. It lay right between her less than bountiful breasts, the drooping chunks of mammary glands and fat having more than enough space between them to house the art. It leaked black and red in sweaty drops as, yes, a sloppy needle had drawn an electric guitar with tears falling from its cartoonish face. It was in honor of her boyfriend Erik, who was in a metal band and had the precise build and shape of a giant red brick.

The artist she had gotten the newest atrocity from was half-blind and older than my grandfather. I had known Gwen for seven years now, and I knew how close she was with the cloudy coot. He never dared to shut down her tattoo parlor or even bequeath it to his nephew, who still had good vision and could hold a needle better than his uncle could.

But even the old man himself had questioned Gwen's tastes for the first time. Having to stare right at her cleavage was enough to last him a week, but etching something as ridiculous as this on it?

"It can't be worse than the girl who got a tattoo of her three-week-old boyfriend's name on her instead of a turtle, like he asked," my friend Farley said a bit too optimistically. "That holds the record in what-the-fuckery."

It still did after the tattoo was finished, but it didn't mean it wasn't a runner-up in one way or another. Gwen adored it. She wore low-cut shirts (much to people's chagrin) and paraded through the town with the red and black mess glowing on her chest. Gwen was not an enormously heavy woman, but she was lumpy, and even the most curvaceous women could wear art on their skin better than she could. The bottom line was that she was becoming a circus act. Like Bradbury's Illustrated Man if the woman who had tattooed him had decided to be more of an asshole than she already was. And given the way this little town functioned, she wouldn't become a tired act for a while.

Two weeks after Gwen had first presented her tattoo, I was opening the café on the corner of Main Street and was busy scrubbing down tables that the birds had designated as their shitting spots. As I rubbed away a particularly stubborn white smear, I was surprised to see Erik, Gwen's boyfriend, angrily storming toward me. Before I could even ask what I had done wrong, he proceeded to throw himself into the café, where Farley, who was also my co-worker, was waiting to take orders.

I could hear his furious barking for some time, listening but never craning my head to look inside, as my hand grew sore against my wet towel and sponge. In the next two minutes, Erik was out of the café, huffing and puffing, a bagel in one first and a cup of coffee in the other. Deciding that the shit cleaning could wait for a bit, I strolled inside and saw Farley, visibly rolling his eyes, as he started re-arranging pastries.

"The fuck was that all about?"

"It's Gwen," Farley replied.

"Why the fuck was he confiding in you?"

"Because I like his music," he replied, sneering. "And I'm always the one who treats him here."

"So what's the problem?"

My friend sighed. "Seems that Gwen heard from a friend of a friend of a friend that, surprise, surprise, Erik hates the new tattoo. Like, really hates it. Thinks it's nasty." Had he realized how stupid the other tattoos were, too? "He says it distracts him when he tries to talk to her."

"Or motorboat her," I shot back.

Farley pretended to throw a muffin at me before proceeding to take a large bite out of the merchandise.

"Anyway," he continued in between chews, "Gwen bitched him out, threatened to break up with him, and Erik said fine, go ahead, maybe he wouldn't date a freak. Well, that made her really upset, so she's apparently been going around to all his bandmates, trying to spread lies about him and see if one of them would like to fuck her. Simple strategy, really."

"Stupid strategy, really."

He swallowed a large mouthful of poppyseed. "I didn't say it wasn't stupid," he sighed. "I said it was simple."

Simple, stupid. Simple could be a synonym for that occasionally. I didn't care. I went back to my job, cleaning and buffing the tables, so that by the time the customers started arriving in droves, my fingers were stiff and I could barely type up orders on the register.

Walking home, I found that the fog was rolling in from the hills and it was getting to be unnaturally cold for the July evening. Somehow wishing I had a coat, I walked past the scattered, battered array of stores and restaurants I never frequented and was halted by a sudden screaming from, lo and behold, the tattoo parlor. It started as a shrieking that belonged more to a cat than a woman, than a continual roar of emotion as I neared the doorway and, unable to help myself, peeked inside.

It was Gwen, all right, screeching and flailing her arms at the poor old tattoo artist. His nephew leaned against the wall, chewing a large white wad of gum that I could see disappearing and re-appearing along his exposed canines. He didn't seem fazed in the slightest.

"I followed the picture exactly as you asked, Gwendolyn, dear," his uncle was protesting. "You can't blame me for the way it looks."

"Like Hell I can't!" Gwen angrily gurgled. "You half-blind piece of decaying shit, barely able to see your own handiwork. I could walk home and show you the picture right now and you'd see how much you fail at your own job!"

"This is ridiculous!"

"No, you're ridiculous!"

"You're both fucking ridiculous," I heard the young man mutter between snaps of his gum.

But neither of the arguers heard him. It went on for a good five more minutes of back and forth, your-fault-no-your-fault, did-not-did-too bullshit, so that by the time Gwen started stampeding toward the door I had no space to run off before she saw me.

"Ah!" she howled in my direction. "Enjoyed the show, you little brat?"

And just like that, she was gone, tears probably streaming down her face just like the misshapen water droplets coming from her horrid guitar tattoo. Being able to get a close look at her heaving bust as she loomed over me, I could really see how both had been in the wrong. Her design had been awful, but his handiwork was non-existent. I heard deep, hollowed breathing from inside and couldn't help looking in again.

To my partial amazement, the poor old man was crying, head buried his arms as his nephew tried to comfort him. I was pretty much frozen in my spot, unsure of what exactly to say or do. I didn't know these guys and I had never been brave enough to get a tattoo of my own. But then the nephew spotted me and whistled at his sobbing uncle.

"Easy, dude, easy," he coaxed. "We've got a customer."

Did they, now? I walked inside. I smelled mothballs and dust and lemon pledge. I saw dozens upon dozens of photographs on the walls. Smiling faces, showing off tattoos that had done by a younger, sharper man years before.

"Everything okay?" I heard myself asking.

"Yeah," the nephew groaned, rolling his eyes. "Sure."

He led me to a chair. I sat down.

"You're eighteen, right?"

I swallowed. "Nineteen."

"Got ID to prove that?"

I rummaged through my pockets and fished out my wallet. The young man looked at my driver's license and sniffed loudly. It wasn't as loud as his uncle's sniffles, though, and he waved a hand for the older man to go to the backroom and relax.

"He never lets me do the tattoos. Not yet, anyway," he explained. "But this might be my first day."

"I wasn't expecting to get a tattoo."

"Yeah, well," he breathed, "no one does. Unless you really don't want one."

"No, sure, I mean." I was stuttering. "I've just never dared."

"Honestly," the nephew said, "you gotta be careful at your age. Body's still changing, weight's still shifting. What you get now may not look the same in five years. But it really depends."

I thought about a teacher I once had who had gotten labyrinths on both his arms. The tattoo artist, according to him, had sworn never to do that again after him. Because circles are fucking insane to do with a tattoo needle.

"By the way," the nephew was saying, cutting into my thoughts, "I recognize you. You're the chick wo works at the café."

"That's right."

He smiled. "I'm Todd."

"Jenna."

He shook my hand and perused my fingers. They still ached from work.

"You a nerd, Jenna?"

I shrugged. "More so than my friend Farley, I guess."

"Legend of Zelda fan?"

"Yeah, love it."

"Well, then," Todd grinned, "how about a Triforce tattoo on the back of your hand?"

I cringed. "There's not a whole lot of flab there to withstand the pain."

"Trust me," he murmured, "I'll take good care of you."

I laughed. At this point, it was better than Gwen's blue bubble heart.

This week's prompt was provided by Daniel Bulone.