The Ink Reward

By Kasie Whitener 

The buzz in this room isn’t the only one. Down the hall are two other artists, two more permanent works being stenciled in flesh and blood and ink. 

Are they getting something dark and sinister like skulls or horror movie characters? A naked Madonna standing by the side of the road with a cigarette hanging from her pouty lips like my friend Cory put on his deltoid in 2002? 

What are their stories? What story will I write? 

“I’ve never known anyone named Adam,” says the opening line of my Carrie McCray Award-winning short story "Cover Up." It fictionalizes the first visit to Adam, the artist now leaning over my arm, buzzing needle in hand. 

The narrator, a middle-aged mother and wife, visits a studio to have an old tattoo covered up. A midlife awakening occurs: the excavation of a younger version of herself spawned by the subtle sexuality of trusting someone not her husband in such intimate contact. 

Cover Up, was also part of my second visit with Adam. A year ago, some four years after our first encounter, I found him at a studio called 7 Sins, and asked for a monarch butterfly. 

“She wrote a story about you,” my sister told him. “And it won an award.” 

I emailed it to him. It’s more sexual than I remember. It’s also fiction. But it still made that visit awkward. 

On the inside of my right wrist, connected imagery to my first novel, After December, is a monarch butterfly. I’ve decided to get a series of butterflies from wrist to elbow, one for each published book. 

So here I am, a year later and two more books with ISBNs, marking myself again. Under Adam’s capable hand. His pale green eyes. His smile hidden by the pandemic mask. The intimacy of this encounter more about voices and stories and talking me through the excruciating pain. 

Tattoos hurt. 

“Do you do anything special when you finish a book?” Adam asks. He means a cigar, a good bottle of wine, a weekend vacay. But the answer is no, there’s nothing ritualistic in the writing of stories or the finishing thereof. Only in the publishing. And I’m doing it now. 

“I get tattoos,” I say and wince. “Doesn’t that qualify?” 

“But that’s after publication,” he says. 

In Cover Up, the excavation reminds the narrator about her own corporeal existence. She leaves the tattoo artist’s hands having recaptured a sense that she’s real. Breakable. Not an idea or a job or a title or the sum of her own aspirations. 

Real is being published. Others are buying the book. Reading the book. Taking what I’ve done and letting it change them.

Like a butterfly is a changed caterpillar, publishing is emerging. Existing in the way Word documents and ideas for stories never can. Legitimized not by the effort itself, but by the recognition of that effort as released. 

Two new butterflies joined the first one this year. Titles in flight. Inked and real.