Her mother had protested the very idea. An outdated, useless, barbaric custom. Why did he want to put their only child through it? Hadn't he told her over and over of the pain, the hurt the anguish of the ink? Of the disappointment when all the tatist found in his skin was flowers? Alien, unfamiliar flowers that twined around his legs and bloomed on his back, his chest, his genitals?
And wasn't it the same flowers that had captured her? he argued back. Great, drooping starts that called to her, spoke to her, entranced her. Did she not feel the emptiness of her skin against the blooming garden of his? Would she deny her own daughter, her own flesh the exquisite fullness the ink created? Pain? Yes, there was pain, but it ended, as pain did, and the gift left behind was worth every moment of agony, of anguish, of fear.
She sighed, defeated, for she had felt the incompleteness of her skin. A yearning awoken by the fragrant stars in her husband's skin. She had met the tatist once, in the street, shortly after her marriage, a small woman with wise, ancient eyes and clouds drifting across her face and mounding over her chest. The tatist had looked at her with her wise, ancient, sad eyes and smiled, a wise, ancient, sad curl of her lips and said a single word. Moths. And Andra's mother had seen them in her mind, drifting on the wind, improbably wings spread to steer, to catch the shifting breezes. She had seen them, as alien as the flowers in her husband's skin, and known, at last the form of her yearning. So, she had given in, let her husband take their daughter back to the village of his birth, to the tatist who dreamed in ink.
Copyright 2006 Rachel McElhinney
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