With a shaky grip, he fists my shirt, yanking me down so we’re eye level. “And if you ever break her heart, I’ll claw my way outta the great beyond and drag you back to hell with me just to bask in your infinite misery.”
He releases me from his hold and brushes past me, where I’m left standing alone in his office.
“I promise.”
We sit across from each other in my office as we eat our meal. I swear food tastes better when I eat with Kelly.
“I finalized my design for the Bozeman expo. Wanna see?” she asks. I nod, taking a bite.More than anything.
Kelly grabs her tablet from beside her and taps the screen to wake it up, then swipes a couple times and leans forward to hand the device to me across the desk. When I take it from her, she returns to her meal, and I look away before I witness how well she can fit her mouth around the massive burrito.
Swallowing, I adjust my glasses while inspecting her artwork. It’s a realism piece. Her gaze is hot on my skin as I examine the casually floating astronaut. The buoyant posing is fantastic. Across from the astronaut is a deep-sea diver. My lips turn up in a smile. “Talk to me about it,” I say, keeping my eyes on the piece while she speaks.
“I was thinking about Dad. I wanted something that evokes the idea of being caught between worlds, because that’s how it feels sometimes. Like we’re still together but just stuck on different planes.”
I exhale through my nose and glimpse at her briefly. “Then if you zoom into their visors . . .”
My fingers pinch and stretch on the screen over the astronaut’s helmet, and I see she’s added the reflection of the deep-sea diver’s helmet, and vice versa.
“You have your model already, right?” I’m sure it wasn’t hard for her to find someone to volunteer to be her canvas for the event.
“Yeah, she’s actually local to Bozeman. So we’re going to have one on her left thigh and the other on her right, facing each other . . . I thought about putting them on the same part of the body, it might get me more points if I have to curve them around a leg or something, but I kind of like the idea of the distance changing between them throughout the day, whether walking or sitting still . . . So, yeah . . . What do you think?”
When I look up, she’s biting the corner of her lip, her eyes darting back and forth between the screen and me. I fucking love the way this woman’s brain works. I zoom in and out of different areas, admiring the detail and use of shadows. “This is rad, Kelly.”
A slow smile spreads. “Really?”
She holds her hand out for the tablet, and I give it back to her, smiling. “I love it. It’s going to show a lot of skill. Keeping your lines and shading clean will give it the biggest impact.”
“I’m nervous, realism is so hard. And I don’t have any faces. The winners almost always show faces. Maybe I should just do something simple, enter one of the smaller competitions.”
“Are you doing it for your dad?” She nods.
I point my finger at her tablet. “Then do it for your dad.”
Kelly has a unique style. I’m confident that in a lineup of five hundred tattoos, I’d spot hers in a heartbeat. It’s expressive. Sharp. Bold, yet somehow delicate—and always whimsical. Clyde was always a little cheeky in his designs, that’s something they have in common. He was a stoic man, but the joy he had for tattooing was always present.
“Have you come up with any ideas for flash at the event?”
Each of us is designing a few sheets of exclusive flash designs for Bozeman. Keeping the designs we’re offering limited helps us know how much time will be spent on each client so we can fit more people into the schedule.
She chews while nodding, then swallows. “Yeah, I’m thinking of doing like western-themed centaurs. Like cowgirls and cowboys, except half horse. Get it?”
Like I said, whimsical.
“Very cool,” I say, with a small chuckle. “Is that what you’re practicing tonight?”
“Nah, tonight I gotta ask the hat.”
The hatis one of Clyde’s old trucker caps she keeps in my office; in it are a bunch of small crumpled pieces of paper. Each paper has a different tattoo style and subject, and she uses the random picks from the hat as a prompt because it takes away the decision fatigue. It’s very Kelly to do it this way, leaving things to fate. She’s into crystals and tarot and all that witchy shit. It’s frustrating as hell sometimes, but it’s part of her charm.
When I was Clyde’s apprentice, he made me practice so many different styles before I landed on what my specialties were: traditional, black and gray, blackwork, and to my own surprise, surrealism. Adding realism to my repertoire was challenging. In the beginning, I was annoyed with Clyde for making me learn styles I didn’t ever plan on using professionally. I was a fan ofhiswork, I wanted him to teach mehisstyle of tattooing. He was quick to correct me in saying no one would ever tattoo exactly like him, and no one would ever tattoo exactly like me, either—and every artist had a responsibility to find that out for themself.
Art was a journey and couldn’t be kept in a box. Learning various mediums and styles would make me a more well-rounded artist. And he was right. Black and gray taught me how to master smooth shading, traditional taught me about design and silhouette, Japanese helped me understand composition, realism helped me conquer light sources and shadow. It was in this that I discovered my passion for painting. And I plan to teach Kelly the same way her dad taught me.
Leaning over, I grab the brim of the hat and hold it out in front of her to pick from. She makes a big display of covering her eyes with one hand while she takes a big pinch and draws three papers with the other.
Pick one: Anatomy
