Owen Minor saw that the mail was scattered on the floor inside the door and he hurried over to it, smiling, because the latest issue of Inked was right on top. He snatched it up and saw that another magazine, Tattoo Life, was nestled under it. Now he was doubly happy.
He took both magazines with him, leaving the rest of the mail on the floor, and ran upstairs to his bedroom. The bed was littered with other periodicals, both commercial and industry. Apart from older copies of the ones that had come in today’s mail, there were back issues of Inked Girls, Freshly Inked, Skin Deep, Tattoo Energy, Paperchasers Ink, Urban Ink, Skin Shots, Rebel Ink, Tattoo Society, Things & Ink, Tattoo, and Tattoo Master. There were reams of printouts of people—men and women—from tattoo websites. Owen was not entirely sure he was heterosexual but acted as if he was, more out of habit than anything else. Photos of either gender, or the gender neutral, with tattoos turned him on. And not the people, exactly. It was the ink that intoxicated him.
Because ink was a pathway to memories. If he couldn’t have his own, then he wanted any he could take.
Since going looking for people to touch, he’d found more than forty. All strangers, though, and the frustration level was mounting. The memories were so scattershot, and some were almost toxic.
When he brushed a waitress at a truck stop in Colorado he took a tattoo of a hummingbird. Because she had such sad eyes, Owen thought it might be tied to something important—a lost love or a lost child. But the woman simply loved hummingbirds and he spent a whole night trying to wave the fucking things away from him while he cowered under blankets. If he’d been able to actually touch them he would have swatted them out of the air and crushed their little bones in his fists. But he could not touch the dreams in that way.
Another time he took a shamrock from the shoulder of an old man on Venice Beach. The kind of guy who looked like he’d been all around the block and had some real stories to tell. Real memories. Owen pretended to lose his balance on the sand and grabbed the guy’s shoulder for support. That night he thought he’d dream of maybe something like a bunch of Irish guys drinking and carousing. Instead he found himself sitting bedside as a small girl of about ten lay fighting for every breath. The man, then a priest in a neighborhood in Chicago, held her hand and prayed with every atom of his being. He bargained with God for the life of the little girl. He staked all of his faith and all of his need against a tiny flicker of mercy from something vast and unseen. He believed completely that God would answer, would spare that fragile child. But, in the deep darkness after midnight, those small and weary lungs simply could not take the next breath. The frail chest settled back and the tension in her limbs evaporated, leaving a shell filled with nothing.
The priest’s faith had been eroded for years, and this was his dark night of the soul. However, instead of a light of understanding or a rekindling of his sputtering faith, a black wind brought only cold darkness. His priesthood did not end that night, but his belief in a loving God did. The man fell away from the church in slow degrees, and twenty years later he was a bitter English teacher in an inner-city school in California. He drank but was not a drunk. He wept, but he was not entirely broken. The shamrock behind his shoulder was there to remind him of the luck that had failed him. In the dream, Owen could see that the green flower had once been a cross the man had gotten inked when he was contemplating the priesthood. It was modified into a four-leaf clover during one brief spell of optimism, but was now forgotten.
All through that night Owen fed on the memories of that little girl, and of others who had come to the priest hoping that he could intercede with the Lord or with saints. It was a symbol of loss that ran as deep as the soul.
And it was so fucking delicious.
Owen went back to the beach the next day and the next, looking for the old priest, but he never found him. The stolen dreams came and went. Some annoyed him. Some fed him. The best ones fed him. His only real regret was that once he’d devoured the memories, the tattoos faded entirely. No second helpings.
He opened the new copy of Inked and began reading. Learning more about the art and science of tattoos. About the politics of them. About the different frequencies of tattoo culture. People who got tattoos because they were into Star Wars or Pokémon or other pop culture stuff. People who get them because they belonged to a club, or a group, or shared an identity.
He read for nearly forty minutes before he found an article that literally took his breath away. The focus was on tattoos representing loss—people whose children had died, friends/family of murder victims, relatives of vets KIA, friends of suicides. The writer included fragments of interviews that cut right to the heart. One sidebar, though, cut even deeper. It was about a marine and three close friends who’d been through Parris Island with him, who shipped out with him in the early days of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and who’d all died on the same bad night in Nasiriyah. The marine had their names inked onto his forearm and after that no bullet touched him, no mine killed him. Because his friends were there looking out for him, watching over. A brotherhood of ghosts. However, five years after he was discharged, the marine lost that arm in a farming accident, got it caught in a thresher. The lost of that tattoo absolutely crushed him, because he’d come to believe it was a very real connection with his dead friends. The man said he hit the bottle and then spent years in personal and group therapy, battling the demons of PTSD, survivor’s guilt, and unrelenting grief.
Owen read that article ten times, back-to-back.
He was crying. He was laughing.
He had never been happier.