This tattoo session was different. There was a needle, yes, and there was pain (more than enough), and there were memories. Yael sat in the cracked leather chair in the artist’s back closet on Luisen Street. It had been almost a year since she saw the man last, yet he looked so much older. His glasses were too big on his face. There were lines around his cheeks that hadn’t been there before.
He wouldn’t take Yael’s money, even when she thrust two tattoos’ worth of marks at him.
“It’s the least I can do. After what you and the others did… I can sell art again,” he said in a quiet voice as he began prepping the needle. Gathering the ink. “What are two more wolves compared to a new start?”
Two more wolves. That wouldn’t do. Henryka’s memory belonged in the pack, but Luka… Yael’s thoughts filled with a brown jacket and cigarettes. Things Luka Löwe used to set himself apart because he wasn’t like the others. Never like the others.
Luka Löwe—the boy she hated, the boy she loved, the boy she lost—was not a wolf.
“Just one more wolf,” she told the artist. “Then I want a different animal.”
The man’s fingers were a ballad of movement, setting the needle down, picking his sketch pad up. He grabbed a charcoal pencil from behind his ear and brought it to the page in a skillful rendering of Henryka’s wolf. Lines that would cross the skin of Yael’s elbow from the fangs of Vlad’s wolf into…
“What’s the second creature?”
Not a wolf, not a wolf, not a wolf.
Luka had always reminded her of something else. Predatory and proud, lounging across floors and desert sands. Looking at Yael with a dangerous, fierce emotion in his eyes. (Love, she knew now, love that was still clawing her heart raw.) Fighting when it mattered the most.
“A lion,” Yael whispered.
The artist continued drawing—all concentration—his tongue poking out of the corner of his lips. Stroke by stroke, the lion took shape. Big mane, long lope, muscles of power—all conveyed by a collection of elegant lines. The creature would flow seamlessly from Henryka’s wolf into the blank skin of Yael’s left bicep, leaping between the old life and the new.
“Will this do?” The artist held up his sketchbook. Final wolf and only lion.
Yael didn’t trust herself to speak. She nodded and offered out her arm one last time. The tattoo needle hurt like it always did, sliding deep into the layers of her dermis. The artist copied his lines from paper to skin with perfect precision. Buzz, buzz, buzz. Tails, torsos, heads. Buzz, buzz, buzz. Pain with every line. Pain that meant life.
Some hours passed before the needle finally fell silent.
It felt very much like an ending.
The shapes of the wolf and the lion glowed hot as Yael sat up and examined the artist’s work. The wounds were raw, red, exposed, but Yael could see what they were to become. Dozens of delicate, spidery lines connected the memory of Luka Löwe and Henryka to her other ghosts.
Babushka, Mama, Miriam, Aaron-Klaus, Vlad, Henryka, Luka.
The living and the dead.
The remembered.
The artist took just as much care in bandaging up the tattoo as he had in making it. The stinging smell of witch hazel wafted through the closet as he wrapped the gauze around Yael’s arm.
“Make sure you change the bandages and clean it regularly,” he instructed her. “It will take time to heal. Just like all the others.”