The Tattoo Thieves
Fiction by Athena Schreindler
‘Do Not Eat Your Heart Out’ [fol. 22 recto] by a French early 16th Century artist, Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington
“Why is my sweater so wet?” I muse to myself.
Suddenly, I am 5 years old again, embraced in my mother’s heavily inked body, while she explains how people come into tattoos. She explains that some are gifts, bestowed at birth, and others are awarded through various acts. However, a few are cleaved off another’s body and pasted on their own. People have inked markings of all sorts: kindness, bravery, beauty, wit, intelligence, generosity. The thieves were not blessed with ink at birth or had theirs stolen when they were young. They can earn their own tattoos, the way others do, but instead they choose to steal. The thief can not keep the stolen tattoo for long; the rotten stench and fraying edges is inevitable when forced upon the false host. Nevertheless, they are convincing at first; after all, nobody expects a tattoo to be stolen. Even if you smell the rotting flesh and see the fraying edges, you would explain them away too.
“And why is my sweater so wet?”
“Why is there blood on my window? A woman too? And a strange man behind her?”
I turn around to see that the tattoo that ensnared me a few months prior is now a rotted, leaking, yellow cadaver on the floor beside him. My eyes wander up in horror to see my own tattoo, ripped from my own flesh, plastered upon his chest with the edges fraying.
I can clearly see it is not his—nobody will believe it is.
Athena Schreindler is a student at the University of Windsor and hopes to pursue writing and illustrating children's books.