I've been thinking about it for two days.
I'm going to do it.
* * *
It’s like I blinked and now it’s Thursday morning.
I'm up before her in the dark.
Coffee. The cigarette in its bag where I left it on the counter.
I go to the kitchen drawer next to the stove and pull out the kit from behind the matchbooks and the spare keys.
Small black case. Hard plastic. Worn at the corners from a decade of moving—Laredo to Sharp, the bunkhouse to my first cabin to this one.
I haven't opened it in two years.
I've put ink on four brothers in this club.
Banshee's Saints across the back of his shoulders the night before he got patched.
Bullseye's wife's name on his bicep.
Thunder's daughter's birthdate on his wrist.
Longhorn's mother's name on his collarbone the year she died.
I open it on my kitchen table. Tattoo gun. Power supply.
Three needle cartridges sealed. Two bottles of black ink.
Green soap. Gauze, tape, gloves. A travel-size razor.
Ernesto sold me this kit out of a duffle bag in a parking lot in Laredo eleven years ago for two hundred dollars I didn't have, and he taught me to use it sitting in the back room of a bar he ran in his cousin's name.
He taught me line work first. Then shading. Then how to clean a wound when you've cut too deep. I put my own name on my left forearm in his back room the night before I drove out of Laredo for good.
Phantom doesn't know about the kit. Or maybe he does. Phantom knows a lot of things he doesn't say.
I lay everything out and sit down to wait.
Dakota comes out of my bedroom around six-thirty in one of my shirts and her sleep shorts with her hair loose down her back, and she stops in the doorway.
"What's that?"
"Tattoo kit."
"Yours?"
"Mine."
"You tattoo?"
"I do. Brothers, mostly."
She looks at the kit on the table for a long moment, then she looks at me.
She walks to me, sits in my lap.
