At the top of the stairs, his hand on the doorknob of TATTOO YOU, he waited for a moment, thinking, This isn't me, I don't do this, as he read the stickers fixed to the window pane to the side of the door. "We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone." "Artistic Expression Isn't a Crime." "No One Under Eighteen Admitted." He went inside. Having left work early, he saw, in the reception area, an old-fashioned wood-encased pendulum clock that claimed the time of day as three-thirty. He had expected dinge and filth and spiderweb lighting, but in fact the outer room smelled of pine wood, and, lit by a large window facing south, it had a telltale aura of femininity: a Tiffany lamp, Art Nouveau illustrations on the wall, next to a bookshelf crammed with volumes about tattooing, folk art, birds, and painting.
Odd, he thought, after standing there for what seemed to be two minutes or so, before glancing over at the clock again. It was still 3:30, even though the pendulum was moving.
The office assistant, a large cigarette-smoking woman with a double chin and a complicated crucifix-and-chain earring apparatus, and who was dressed from shoulder to ankle in black, asked him if he had come for a tattoo. He said that he had. He sat down on the sofa, glad that no other customer was waiting here, and examined, without meaning to, the butterfly on her right forearm. On her other forearm was a lily.
She was sitting at a desk, writing on a notepad. "Do you know the size of the tattoo you want?"
He nodded and put the thumb and index finger of his right hand, curved to form a backwards C, into his left palm, and held that up for her. "About this big."
She nodded. "Method of payment? We charge forty-five dollars an hour. Minimum is thirty-five."
He had come prepared. "Cash."
She wrote this down. "And your name?"
"Cyril," he said.
"Cyril what?"
"Cyril Wilson."
"We require a thirty-dollar deposit on all work here before any work is actually done on you." She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. He took out three ten-dollar bills from his wallet and gave them to her. "Where do you want this tattoo, Cyril?"
"I haven't decided."
"All right," she said, and he could tell at once that she was in a bad temper. "We don't do public skin: no face or forehead or neck, no hands and fingers, and absolutely no genitals or any tattoo that requires genital contact. Okay, right?"
"Right."
"We got some notebooks on the table there in front of you if in case you need some idea of what you want put on you." She puffed on her cigarette and daintily tapped the ash onto the back of a porpoise ashtray. "Well? What is it you want?"
"My name."
"Cyril? Is that it?"
"That's right."
"Just that? Cyril? Cursive or Gothic lettering or some other letterhead style?"
"Print. Plain print. Maybe something else too."
"Like what? What else you want?"
"I haven't made up my mind."
"Well, before you go into where the tattooist is, you better make up your mind. You should look in those notebooks on the table in front of you there. Like I said."
"All right."
The first one, the one on top, was labeled Dead Stuff. He opened it. Inside it, page after page, was a cornucopia of the underworld, a harvest of nightmare, a springtime full-flowering of celebratory lyrical menace and bloodflow: pictures of tombstones and wild skeleton cemetery orgies, windblown grim reapers with dead flowers in their buttonholes, the grinning and joyous skulls fixed at every angle, grinning vipers twisted around naked women with their heads thrown back in unconsciousness or submission, skeletons riding foaming horses or yellow Lamborghini convertibles, skeletons with clown faces ravishing nude standing or reclining voluptuaries, dripping-fanged cobras coiled around bloody daggers draining into lakes of blood, other huge orange-haired clowns (he hadn't expected clowns) with machetes and daggers raised high, poised for the ripping downward arc, raging lions one second away from their prey, then more with roses for eyes, and that odd grim smirk most of death-images presented, highstepping dancing cadavers, and a winged dragon enclosing the earth in its batlike wings.
"See anything you like?"
It wasn't exactly what he had in mind. It was all too happy for that, this joyful death-drunk party in the cemetery, the spicey hot-pepper delight in the image of metal flowers and gardens of ash. Oh joyful humpbacked Death, he thought, where was this smile the morning I rowed your boat?
"Not really."
"Men usually like dead stuff. Women get other things."
"I figured."
"We got a book of patriotic, too. Eagles and flags and Iwo Jima. Phrases, too, if you can't think of any. A.P.'ll be ready for you in a minute. She's just finishing up now. You can talk to her about what you want."
"Who's A.P.?"
"She's the tattoo artist. You want to look at the other portfolios? They're under there."
"Such as what?"
"Mister, I don't know what you want. We got flowers and birds. You can do mix-and-match, you know, some dead stuff and some birds. Women like birds. It's what they call a sexual difference. Then we got heroes. Elvis and Laurel and Hardy and Axl Rose. You want Madonna? A.P. did a Madonna last week. She's done Bruce and Prince and she did Buddy Holly once. We also've got a sample book of vow tattoos, you want to see them."
"Vows?"
"Well, yeah, of course. Sure. Suppose you love somebody named Debbie. So you have a vow tattoo for her. 'Debbie until Death.' You know, like that. A vow. On a scroll. And, like, it's there forever, you understand that? These things do not wash off, believe me. It better be Debbie until death, 'cause that's how long it'll be on your arm. But I guess you don't want a vow, right?"
"Right."
"Just your name.
"Yes."
"Cyril"
"Yes."
She gave him an examining look. "You're Cyril?"
"Yes, I am."
"I'm asking," she said, "because we don't see many people coming in here, midafternoon, wearing a suit and a wedding ring, wanting his own name, but it's fine, we can do it, no problem. A.P., she'll be here in a sec."
The two women escorted him to a room with a chair exactly like a dentist's, and AP, a short woman with long hair and glasses, said, "Yeah, it's a dentist's chair all right. Everybody asks. They're my worst clients, dentists. They don't like the pain. They can dish it out, but they can't take it."
He was beginning to feel that he was making a mistake, but a correct mistake, the sort of mistake he would feel grateful for later. The dyes were lined up in a multilayered box; the containers with the dye in them looked like squeegee bottles.
"So," AP asked, "what do you want?"
He explained about the name, and AP asked him what he wanted to go with it. "Nobody does just a name," she said. "That's not art. You need something to go with it, honey. Something to give it a feeling. I can do it, but you got to tell me, first."
"I want a shadow," he said.
"Excuse me? A shadow? A shadow how?"
He had thought of water, of a lake. He had considered a tiny pickup truck, or a scroll. But what he really wanted was a shadow, the very shape of a soul. "I can draw it," he said. "Give me a piece of paper and pencil. I'll show you exactly what I want."
The figure he drew, a human form from the midline up, was half shroud, half shadow, like a profile projected onto a wall.
"You want that?"
"That's it."
"What color?"
"Gray."
"You want a gray tattoo of a face with the name underneath."
"That's right."
"No color?"
"No."
"Not even for the name?"
"You could do the name in red, maybe. But the rest has to be gray."
"Okay. Now where do you want this?"
"Some place," he said, "where I'll know where it is, but no one else will see it."
"All right," she said, sitting back, "if that's what you want, I would put it here." She touched him underneath the upper arm. "You see, the arm is usually held toward the body, so people won't see it there unless you raise this arm over your head. Or I can put it on your buttock or your inner thigh."
"No I don't want it there. The arm. Put it there, on my arm."
"Okay. You can hang up your coat and your shirt over by the sink. There're hangers. Just put 'em on the wall hooks. But I have to warn you about something. That area of the arm, where you want this tattoo, it hurts a little more than some other places in the body."
"That's all right. That's fine," he said, taking off his coat. "That's what I want."