Happy belated Bleat.

So there we have it. The event I've been meaning to mark for the longest time and I clean forgot it.

It's been just over a year since we've been making whining noises on the internet. Has there been a difference? I think it's fairly telling, how it's gone from, "Jesus H. Dissatisfied with life. Mope mope snivel oh whatever shall I do," to "It's 1am. Somebody tell me where the fuck the time went."

I scare myself with how different I've become. Not necessarily better. Just different. And it's interesting how the old self fights it, re-asserts control when facing drop-dead familarity. Bordering bloody schizo, that's what it is.

Though I must say, not neccessarily a bad thing. It's the day and age where having some sort of mental disorder makes you sexier. Got to have most of it set up first, though. Dark, broody, furrowed brow, stubble and everything. Then it's got to be the right sort of disorder. Schizophrenia's quite up there. The whole cannotcontrolangerMUSTKILLNOW gig also applicable. Nothing sexy about fat, bald forty-somethings who spend the day thinking they're chickens.

But yes, I think I'll only hit sexy if I'm dead and presented in front of necrophilic coroner. I do cute pretty well, but we all know that doesn't get you laid.

Here we go, then:

Happy anniversary to me
I've grown a little less creepy
And hopefully 'fore I'm deeeeeeeaaaad
I'll be able to get...

Yes, well. Here's to me not getting fat in seven years.

...two-person joke, that one. Gotta work on that repertoire.

Cheers.

Inking the illusion.

See, not so long.


So, yes. I'll have you know, I'm extremely talented at drawing.

Don't look at me like that. If they can stick a paintbrush on an elephant and sell the canvas as highbrow art, then I have talent, alright?

I take the sheet and familiar click-action plastic black Pilot pen Charles fishes from behind the desk. Feeling a little amused at what I'd got myself into, I lean over the desk, waving away the chair he begins to wheel over. "Mind if I watch?" he asks. Artistic courtesy or something, I vaguely understand.

You'd expect him to go get a drink, put things away or, I don't know, beat off in the loo after a while. But no, for the fifteen or so minutes it took, he was as good as his word. Stood and watched quietly. Surprisingly, it wasn't at all like having someone watch you write. Must be the artist in me. Or lack of, thereof.

The deed duly done, I straighten apprehensively. It was the sort of feeling you get, standing next to an African-American at the urinals. You kinda knew you wouldn't measure up, but you really wanted to know.

This was it, in full photoshopped glory:


...there goes that bit of internet anonymity. Anyway, the thing was black on white, originally.

"Hmmm. Done," quoth I. He studies it. I tense.

Then he looks up from that classic Thinker pose. "I think...you have art in your soul. I like it."

I simpered like a schoolgirl. A little over the top, the art in soul business, but hey, Charles was an artist. They get away with selling little tins of their own excrement. It was a positively mundane statement, in that light.

Either that or he was a really good salesman, I suppose. He then asks why I wanted to get that done and I say quite simply that it was the name I wrote with. At some unknown point, the whole decision process had been quietly disposed of. We discuss where it was to go. Blazed across chest? Arm? Left buttock?

I decided on the less obtrusive lower-back option. It was just for me, after all. Charles smiles as I say this and there was a little feeling of having passed some sort of test. Enigmatically, he tells me not to worry about the price. Trustingly, I...uh, trust him. Come on then, he says, ducking into the doorway. With everything seeming a little surreal, I trot after.

He opens one of the two doors inside and holds it for me. It was...something else. A low black leather...bed thing, a similarly low red metal stool and a mobile steel shelf of sorts occupied the middle of the room. Neatly arranged on the shelf were all sorts of bottles and sharp pointy things I immediately put out of my mind. The far side was the one-way glass, looking out onto the street. The length of the left wall was all mirror and the middle of the right wall led to the next room. On the left of the door, more shelves and on the right, a little basin.

Decor was consistent, the only difference being the lighting was a series of fluorescent tubes instead of wall-mounted lamps. Easier to see with and better for matching colour, you see. I will not lie and say I figured that out all by myself.

What I will say at this point is that the degree of weirdness involved in having another man say to you, "So, you want to take that off?" is something else, altogether.

What goes next is the preview, in two stages. From the side of the shelves, Charles wheels out one of those dressing mirrors and angles it so I can see my back in the mirrored wall. He holds up what I drew against my back, adjusting till I nod. Then he brings the stool over, with some sort of special marker. He deftly copies what I drew onto the spot and presents it for inspection. The talented little bastard gets it in one, on what he calls the rough sketch. Bah.

He confirms that I wanted it done in just black. Then, of course, is the point of no return. With a little huff of finality, he asks if I wanted to lie down on the black...bondage bed thing. Seeing as it was that or spreadeagled against the wall, I confirmed that I did.

I began to understand what Charles was talking about with the back-tattooing. Ok, maybe not. Because while he was talking about surrender, what with the weird clicks and scrapings I could hear BUT NOT SEE coming from behind me, my own emotion more closely approximated sheer terror.

He tells me, as he wipes my back down with a sterilizing swab, that it would hurt a lot at first and get better along the way. Something about endorphins, but like a broken record, the mind replaying "HURT A LOT" drowned out the rest of what he said. Well, at least he was honest about it. He flicks something on and a sewing-machine noise begins.

Besides the psycho ones who cut themselves, most people who get want to get tattoos worry about the pain. What's it like, then? Put it this way, if Pain was a course of study, after you get a tattoo, you graduate with a Bachelor's. Or maybe I'm just a wimp, like that. Professorship reserved for women who go for natural childbirths, because I've had some horrible shits in my life and still cannot imagine passing a football.

And what happens during the thing is, the tattoo gun drives a hollow needle into you and releases a small amount of ink each time. It pierces the upper few layers of skin and deposits the colour right above the fat. There usually aren't any blood vessels in the area, so you don't bleed much. You still, however, get all the other benefits of having a needle driven into you twenty thousand times. With a wipe of alcohol every few minutes to disinfect the area. Also, to refresh the pain.

Charles was right, though. The initial shock does wear off and goes from sharp-stabby to dull-achy in ten minutes or so. Depends on your level of tolerance, he tells me. I'm reckoning mine is about 4cm, the indent I left in the leather after I managed to unhook my fingers.

And after only twenty repetitions of "almost done", it was done. After a swipe of more alcohol as a gentle reminder that, yes, I could feel that much pain, I got off the bed and inspected myself in the mirror. There it was, amidst a throbbing sea of angry red welts. The sad part was, besides the swelling, I couldn't tell much difference between this and the marker-penned one.

Perhaps having seen the look on my face, Charles assured me it would look much better once the swelling subsided. As he handed me a bottle of alcohol and some cotton wool in a bag, I asked him how much I owed him. Cue mental arithmetic face. Then impish grin. "Got fifty?" he asked. "That'll cover the ink. Fuck the rest, it's on me."

Considering I was counting out the hundreds in my mind, it came as a huge, pleasant surprise. Yes, he was definitely sure. He liked me. And no, he didn't do this for everybody. Sure he didn't need the money, but it was a nice thing to have.

He friendlily snapped the note out of my hand and walked me to the door. I didn't have to, but it would be great if I would come back once the swelling was down, so he could see it. And anytime I wanted to hang out, really. Dianne would be back next week and I could meet her then, he said, handing me a business card.

Thanking him again, I told Charles I would love to come back soon and meet her.
But I couldn't. Not soon, not ever.



Because he doesn't exist, you see. And neither does Dianne, or the little shop in Geylang.

Thank you for reading my first work of fiction.

Getting inked.

Yes, it has been that busy.


So we left you at an ambiguously homosexual moment. The air is fraught with tension. Charged with the sort of palpable electricity that scientists who never get shagged refuse to acknowledge the existence of. Myself. Charles. Two decent-looking young blokes sort of alternating between foot-shuffling and playing spot-the-non-existent-spider-on-the-wall.

The moment passes, of course. We handle it in our stride, as men of our stature are wont. Which is to say, we pretend it never happened. So was I thinking of getting a tattoo, he asks. No, I wasn't. It was just that my fountain pen had run dry, you see.

'Course, I wasn't going to risk a steamrolled-squirrel-type joke on someone who would be standing over me with an instrument of torture. Yes, I say. I was thinking about it. Not sure how far it was going to take me but thinking, definitely.

On more even footing now, we perform the dance of the expert salesman and the customer who was probably going to buy something, anyway. He hesitantly brings up the stigma associated with having a tattoo and we laugh about my being used to it with my lack of education. And though I'd briefly entertained something screaming loud down the length of my arm, by now I'd figured that my primary concern with getting any sort of tattoo was going to be the screaming, period.

We talk a little about it, inevitably getting around to me pointing out that Charles had nothing visible on him. He grins a little and turns around, whipping his singlet off.

...yes, that was all that came off.

Starting a little below the shoulder blades, a sword. That was all. Done in shades of black, with a single flare of blue from the one sapphire in the hilt. Angled slightly to the right, it was a little East, a little West, a quiet power more than the sum of its parts. Exquisite, elegant and halfway erotic, it was the sort of thing you could properly use the word, "fusion" for.

Half the blade slides into his spine, with a play of shadow and dimensions so skillful I reached out to examine it before I realized what I was doing. Feel free, he says, and I start a little. No mirrors, so how the... . Of course, he must get that sort of reaction a lot. I slide the fingers of my right hand down the blade, watching it ripple down to the end. It was a real urge, to somehow take hold of the hilt and wrench the thing free.

I snap out of it. It was splendid work and I say so. Shrugging back into the singlet, he smiles. Dianne's work, he says. She has a rose similarly embedded, done by him. Depending on what sort of person you were, you get a tattoo for different reasons. The flamboyant go for any old thing, anywhere. The wannabes get your usual skulls and dragons. Sometimes other reasons are involved, like the remembrance of a person, or to be marked. He tells me I should see some of the Japanese Yakuza without their shirts. Literally, there is no bit of skin un-inked.

For tattooists like himself and Dianne, there were also many ways of going about it. Charles says he knows some who just get their bodies covered for the image - that a tattooist should have tattoos. It was different for himself and Dianne. They weren't in this for the money, but for the art. No matter how skilled your were, you cannot do anything on your own back. So it was the ultimate expression of surrender for them to turn their backs and say, "Yes, you may paint me.

Though I absorbed all of it and found it beautifully fascinating, I will confess to have had two primary thoughts override all else at the time:

1. You rich, good looking bastard.

2. In accordance with the grand scheme of things, Dianne had to be smart, funny and drop-dead gorgeous. With that and the tattoo thing going, one could only begin to imagine the sort of sex they must have. Quite probably on the tattoo chairs. Both. Several times. A night.

Some people.

We get a little smarter this time. Charles flows smoothly on to ask me if I wanted a look at the sort of designs they had, or if I had something in mind already. With the tiny, law-abiding and more importantly, pain-fearing bit of my consciousness banging on the back of my head and asking if I was fucking nuts, I chew my lip thoughtfully.

Oh wot the hell. No obligations yet at this stage, eh? I glance up from examining the carpet.


"Got a pen?"



Getting lateish. Sodding off. No hopes on next opportunity to write being soon, but yes, prolly not this long.