Bad Bad Girl

“Fuck, that hurts,” she finally admitted, waiting for the feeling to dull a little.

“Yeah,” came his unimpressed answer. “I know. I remember getting mine.”

“What’s on your back?” Rebecca asked, trying again to distract herself. Part of her mind was still convinced that he was making her back look like an atrocity.

“A bunch of shit,” he confessed. “But I have my brother’s footprint over this same spot,” he said, pressing his thumb into her rib.

“Like a baby footprint?” Rebecca blurted incredulously.

“Fuck that creepy shit,” Sawyer muttered. “People don’t think about how wacky that’s going to be when the kid is all grown up and shit. I mean, I hate it that my mom insisted on keeping baby clothes stored in a closet; like some serial killer’s memento box. It would turn my shit white every time I went to Mom’s and had to look at my footprint on her goddam leg, like she was a victim of abuse from her toddler.”

Rebecca tried to not laugh, knowing that the more she shook the harder it would be for Sawyer, but she was having a hard time fighting the sensation. “Then I’m confused,” she confessed.

“It’s my brother’s footprint,” Sawyer explained.

“Your brother’s?” she huffed disbelievingly.

“Yup,” he replied, grinding the needle over her spine.

“Like…” Rebecca began, then took a breath.

“I got the tattoo when he was an adult,” he assured her. “And that fucker wears like a size twelve or something. Took forever.”

“And that doesn’t freak him out?” she asked, trying to imagine the large black impression over his rounded back.

“Amos?” Sawyer asked. “Neh. He loves it. Every time I see him, he tries to take my shirt off and walk on me. He’s kind of an asshole that way. He won a bet, so I had to get it.”

Rebecca smothered a laugh into her forearm.

“Stop shaking,” Sawyer said in his typical flat tone. “You’re really messing with me back here.”

“Did you mess up?” she demanded, her mind suddenly awash with images of jagged lines and trailing ends.

“I never mess up,” he declared firmly. “If you shake and I go off a line, that’s your own fault. You mess up.”

The laugh from Rebecca was small and uncertain this time. She wasn’t sure how to take that. Had he gone off a line? Was there some screw up? What the hell was happening back there? She hated not being able to see what he was doing.

“You know, you cuss a lot,” she chided.

Sawyer cleared his throat. “Sorry. Bad habit. It comes with the profession I guess.”

“I’m not saying you should stop or anything,” she quickly clarified. “It was just an observation.”

“Well, it’s not one of my finer points. It’s a habit I would like to stop. My mother always said that cursing was a sign of a lack of intelligence. Those words haunt me every time I get going on a rampage.”

“Sawyer?” came a tired voice from the doorway. Rebecca turned to see the man from the front counter leaning into the room.

“Yeah?” Sawyer answered, in a tone that said he was busy.

“Take a quote?” he asked apologetically.

Sawyer was silent for a moment as he worked his way across Rebecca’s shoulder. “Sure,” he said after a minute, leaning back to study his work.

“Perfect,” the man answered, then said into the hallway, “go on in.”

Rebecca watched as a young couple walked into the space with wide eyes and nervous steps.

“Holy shit,” the boy said to his girlfriend. Rebecca guessed they couldn’t have been a day over eighteen, and the squeak in the boy’s voice didn’t help with that image. “Look at all this, babe.”

“What’s up guys?” Sawyer asked, hurrying the interaction along.

The two stood there in shock for a moment, looking at each other and silently debating who should do the talking.

“Let me guess,” Sawyer muttered. “You want tattoos?”

The boy laughed awkwardly, and the girl gave a serious nod. “I want the saying on my family’s crest tattooed on my arm right here,” the boy said then, touching the front of his bicep. “It’s Latin, and it means ‘We are one, we unite’.”

“Just spell check that shit,” Sawyer answered, still carving lines in Rebecca’s back. “I don’t speak Latin. So I’m going to do up whatever you write, and if it’s wrong, I will have no way of knowing.”

“Yeah, sure,” the boy answered quickly.

“What kind of lettering?” Sawyer asked, and Rebecca thought she heard impatience growing in his tone.

“Just like, you know,” the kid replied. “Make it look like handwriting, and about this big.” He made a circle with his hands, and Sawyer nodded.

“Three hundred bucks,” he answered, then tipped his head at the girl. “And you?”

“I, uh…” she sputtered, looking at her boyfriend. “I want my son’s footprint on the back of my shoulder.”

Rebecca worked hard to keep her face straight.

“Names?” Sawyer asked, his tattoo machine still buzzing away happily. “Dates?”