I smile encouragingly. A booty tattoo I can handle.
“Not a problem in the least,” I say, and snap on gloves. “I’m gonna have you sit in a minute, but it’s best to get a look at it while you’re standing first, if you don’t mind pulling down — thanks.”
She’s already got her jeans over her butt, so I crouch down and study her ass. This position is always a little weird, but movement and gravity affect tattoos, so I like to get a look at them in all positions.
It’s a script tattoo, the lines thin and wispy, so many flourishes and curlicues that it’s total nonsense at first glance. Not a bad tattoo, but not a good one, either. Some of the ink is fading, a few of the lines are a little wobbly. A solid C+.
If she’d come to me, at the very least I’d have advised her away from that particular font. It’s almost impossible to read.
“Well, the good news is that at first glance, I think a coverup should work pretty nicely,” I tell her, standing. “It’ll have to be a little bigger than the original tattoo, so it’ll probably be visible in swimsuits and whatnot, but I think we could pretty easily work this design into something else entirely.”
“What’s the bad news?” Mindy asks, looking at me over her shoulder.
“I need you face down and booty up on the table,” I say.
“I get that all the time,” she cracks.
She gets on the massage table, adjusts her clothes so I have full butt cheek access. I drape a towel across the other cheek because why be more naked than you have to with strangers?
“How long have you had it?” I ask, sitting on my stool and pulling over my billion-watt light so I can really get up close and personal.
“Five years, I think,” she says. “Wait, no. Six? I already had it when I went on my sister’s bachelorette weekend to Myrtle Beach because I remember drinking too many margaritas and talking to her friend Beth about it and I think her fifth anniversary was maybe last year, so…”
I move my head around some, adjust the light while she talks. I’m tempted to ask who put this unreadable tattoo on her, but that seems rude, so instead I let her start telling me about her sister’s bachelorette party while I try to decipher it.
“She got this really amazing beach house,” Mindy’s saying. “It had an outdoor shower, and I guess it’s for getting sand off of you but one night after a few tequila shots some of us went out there —"
Pv… Prapiv… Property
Good Lord.
Property of…
Yikes.
Ji… Le… Leth?
I tilt my head the other way.
Seth
My stomach knots. I read it again, slowly: Seth.
I can feel my heartbeat in every part of my body, most of all the gloved fingers still touching Mindy’s butt. My lungs feel like they’re filled with aquarium gravel, but I breathe in anyway.
The last word is easy to read, because I already know what it’s going to be.
Property of Seth Loveless.
I want to cry. I also want to scream. I also want to gather everyone I know into this room, point at this butt, and shout This is why, this right fucking here is exactly fucking why.
“— anyway they said they’d give me a hundred bucks if I’d take my top off and throw it out, and you know it wasn’t even like anyone could even see into the shower because it had a wall around it, so I figured why not? And then —”
I think of him taking the bobby pins from my hair Saturday night, in front of the mirror. Slow, gentle. The shivers down my spine. Him getting all the concealer off my chest piece. The way he looked at it for the first time and didn’t say anything.
I wonder if he was thinking of this tattoo. I wonder if he’d rather mine said, in ugly, unreadable script, Seth Loveless fucked me up.
“It’s fixable, right?” she says, and I suddenly look up at her head to realize that she’s watching me, her blue eyes staring down the length of her table.
I clear my throat. I clear it again. Arrange my face.
“You should get this removed,” I tell her.
“I should?” she says, surprised.
Shit. I didn’t mean to say that. I push a smile onto my face, look at the tattoo again, as if I don’t already have it memorized.
“You’d be a good candidate for it,” I say. “Laser removal works best when you’ve got dark ink on light skin.”
I want this tattoo gone. I know he’s not mine. This tattoo is exactly why he’s not, but jealousy already has its ugly dark tentacles wrapped around me.
“I thought that was real expensive,” Mindy says. “Like a couple thousand dollars at least? And I’d have to go all the way into Roanoke for each session?”
“It’s not for everyone,” I say, as lightly as I can stand. “Just wanted to let you know it’s an option. You said you’ve had it about six years?”
“I think that’s right,” she says. “Does the exact number matter? I can go back through all the pictures in my phone and figure out when exactly I got it.”
I have to bite my lip between my teeth to keep myself from saying yes, from asking me to show me the pictures of it when it was new and tell me who she sent pictures to and what they thought and if they liked it.
If he fucked her harder when he looked at it.
“I don’t need the exact date,” I say, jabbing at her butt cheek with my gloved fingers, just because I can. “It’s just helpful to have a general idea.”
“I think it’s been about six years,” she says, and then laughs, her voice muffled by the padded table. “We didn’t even date for six weeks.”
I stand. Breathe in, breathe out.
“Must have been short but intense,” I say.
I walk over to a table, pull a bolt of tracing paper off a roll.
Mindy just sighs.
“Was it ever,” she says.
I know I could say something. I could tell her that I, too, had a short but intense affair with Seth Loveless. That he’s also made me batshit insane sometimes. We could have camaraderie: two women, done wrong by the same man.
I don’t want it.
“As far as coverups go, we’ve got a few options,” I say. I sit again, tattoo practically staring at me. “If your main concern is rendering the text unreadable, we could use the other line work in a new design.”
“Yeah, I mostly just want the name gone,” she says. “My boyfriend won’t do it doggie style unless I’m wearing crotchless panties to cover it up.”
That’s a lot of information from a woman who called it her booty.
“That gives us more options,” I tell her.
“Marty wants me to put his name on there instead,” she offers. “And I love him and all, but I’m already getting one name removed…”
“I generally advise against names in tattoos,” I tell her, and start sticking the tracing paper to her butt, folding, carefully pressing. “For one thing, word tattoos don’t tend to age well. They get faded or stretched, and next thing you know they’re unreadable.”
“And also you might not always be with the person?” Mindy says, dryly.
No shit.
“I like to lead with the technical reasons,” I say. “For some reason, people don’t love it when you suggest they’re going to break up.”