THE TATTOO

 

The Tattoo

© 2019 Leland Dirks.

He was seventy-five, and I was the only one of his seven nephews who would visit him. Sharp as a tack, he reeled off one-liners faster than anyone I’d ever met.

Sometimes he’d tell me stories. What it was like to look for someone to love when that search could get you fired or killed. What it was like to change the gender of the one you loved when you talked about them. What it was like to know a friend committed suicide because he was being blackmailed or because he’d been disowned from his family.

Other times he’d tell me the glorious stories of dating a Marine on the down low. Of finding a bar that catered to a clientele of men who preferred the company of other men.

The summer he turned seventy-six, I spent a week with him. In the year between this visit and my last, he’d aged a decade. His skin was nearly translucent. In the evening sun, sometimes I thought I could see his bones through his skin.

There weren’t so many jokes nor very many stories. He walked slower, more cautiously, afraid to fall. I pretended not to notice.

On my last day with him, I asked him if there was anything special he wanted to do. He looked at me for a second, as if trying to discern my reaction before he’d even answered. He swallowed. Hard.

“There is.”

“Okay.”

“You promise not to laugh?”

“I swear.”

“I want a tattoo.”

“Let’s do it.”

We drove thirty-five miles to the nearest tattoo parlor. His face lit up like a Christmas tree when they showed us the books of artwork that, for a small fee, could live forever on skin.

“What do you think you want?”

“Oh, I already know. But it’s fun looking at other ideas, too.”

I didn’t press him. He took off his shirt, and I tried to imagine what he must have looked like when he was in the Navy some fifty years before.

He whispered in the tattoo artist’s ear and prepared himself for what must have been a lifelong dream.

I watched as they drew an outline of the tattoo above his heart. Simple. Geometric. A triangle.

He saw my questioning look.

“It’s what the Nazis made thousands of homosexuals wear in the concentration camps. A pink triangle. We took it back, as a sign of liberation, long before anyone thought of a rainbow flag. So we’d never forget what happens when a whole group of people are demonized. So we’d remember how thin the veneer of civilization really is.”

The sound of the automated needle filled the small space. I watched the black outline take shape. I watched as the pink was colored in. He grimaced every once in a while but was stoic overall.

The tattooist finished, gave him care instructions, and asked him if he was satisfied. Uncle only nodded, but the grin on his face made him look a decade younger.

He got ready to pay, but I stopped him. His sky blue eyes searched my face.

“Think they’d give us a discount for two?”

He died that winter, and I couldn’t make it to his funeral. But every day when I step out of the shower and look in the mirror, I remember how two black sheep of the family wound up with pink triangles on their chests, and sometimes I cry.

© 2019 Leland Dirks.

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