More words...

Andra knew no pain as the ink sank into her skin. Her father had said there would be pain as the tatist found the shapes in her skin. There was no pain, only heat and pleasure. The tatist said the ink took some people like that. It was different for everyone, the tatist said. She, herself, had felt rain, warm and wet as tears, while the clouds massed across her skin.

Andra sometimes wondered if the tatist had known it would be dragons from the beginning. If she had seen the dragons in Andra's skin even before the ink had given them form. The first curled around her right hip, head resting on the jut of her hip bone, tail curling lazily across to the juncture of her thighs. The second nestled along the hollow of her collarbone and draped around her shoulders, one clawed foot curling into the short hairs at the nape of her neck. The third twined around her left leg from ankle to knee. The fourth--

Four, whispered the tatist to Andra's father, as delicate, jewel-edged scales emerged from the ink in her hands. She had never dreamed dragons in ink before. Her teacher had told her of dragons, but even in his long life he had never had them under his hands. Almost she stopped, drew away the ink, but she could not leave them incomplete. Beautiful and terrible together the fourth draon twisted across Andra's back and curled around her torso in an eternal embrace.

An experiment in words...

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 An outdated, useless, barbaric custom.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