Permanence

For once, the company of young men delights Dorothy. JB nods as Dorothy describes what she wants: the outline of a heron just taking flight, wings raised, beak pointing toward its destination. A small tattoo on a forearm, a glimpse of feathers whenever she pushes up her sleeve.

Dorothy studies JB while he leans over his sketchbook. Swallows circle his neck. His arms sport bright red tulips, skulls, a gothic “Tempus fugit.” Dorothy has many questions about each tattoo’s placement and meaning. What other tattoos hide beneath his clothes? If he took off his shirt would his chest reveal a dragon? A woman’s name pierced by an arrow?

Her grandson Ethan sets a cup of tea on the cocktail table beside her and winks. Needle Mania doesn’t open for at least an hour. Dorothy takes in the walls of the shop. Hundreds of framed tattoo designs — ships in bottles, Kanji characters, Betty Boops, baskets of fruit, Tarot cards, knives, hourglasses with grains of sand frozen between two spheres. Ethan says the adrenaline rush and ritual of healing a tattoo are addictive. Each design holds a whole story, and surrounded by drums and footprints and lions, Dorothy understands the desire to make a body a witness to a host of images and words — a hummingbird, deer, a stand of birch trees, lines from Rilke, Mary Oliver, “Amazing Grace” — each a talisman of transformation.

But she hears her wife Jean’s voice, fretting about infections, about Dorothy’s eighty-three-year-old skin. The last time they argued about Dorothy getting a tattoo, Jean threw up her hands in frustration: “What if you change your mind? A tattoo is forever.”

Jean has always been a worrier. Dorothy has moved on to a new place in life, a place where worry has disappeared from the landscape. Who knows how much longer she’ll live? A few more years, perhaps a decade. It doesn’t matter. She inhabits each moment – the lights at Christmas, the snow swirling under streetlamps. The tang of oranges and cranberry. It is enough for her now. But Jean is young, not even seventy-five. Something switches when you cross the threshold of a new decade. Dorothy has already lived past the ages both her parents died. If Jean could see the wall of stories, she would understand why Dorothy trusts this young man now looking up from his drawing, the silhouette of a heron stretched in flight, framed by a full moon.

“It’s exquisite.” Dorothy sets her cup on the saucer. Ethan places a hand on her shoulder as he looks at the design with her.

“I can make a stencil now and tattoo you this morning if you’d like.”

Dorothy turns to Ethan. He smiles, waits for her to decide.

She sees herself leaning on a shovel in the garden, sleeves rolled up, arm wiping the sweat from her forehead under a heron rising by moonlight.

“Let’s do it. No time like the present.”