Inkless

Chapter 3

We sit at the dinner table, nobody saying a word. It's never tense like this, but it is tonight. Only because we had just witnessed my mother get another tattoo. This one was a small silhouette of a cat, located on her collarbone.

I, of course was the first to notice it. I always notice other people's tattoos. I had watched it slowly draw itself into her skin. Something that tattoos always did. They never just appeared as a whole. They grew from one point. It's beautiful, and I want to have that beauty bestow itself on me.

I really want to figure out what that cat means on her collarbone, but I must finish dinner first. My mom notices me poking and prodding at my food as she says "Christa are hungry..?" I shake my head and she motions for me to go.

I walk down the hall back to my room. My safe haven, yet my torture chamber. Some nights it hides my muffled sobs from the rest of the world. Other nights it causes my muffled sobs as I cry into my pillow after staring myself down in the mirror.

The door clicks shut behind me as I step into my room. I glance at mirror before kneeling on the floor and grabbing the books beneath my bed. I toss them all onto my bed and I land on it with them. I search through the pile until I find a black leather bound book. On the cover it says "animal symbolizations". I flip the book open to the 'C' category in the book.

The first animal listed in 'C' is cat. The exact animal I'm looking for. Halfway through the page I find the meaning a cat symbolizes. It symbolizes curiosity. Curious about what though? This is what I do, I observe people's tattoos and find out the meaning myself. I suppose it fills in for the emptiness I feel when I think about my inkless skin.

These books are all hand written, by my great grandfather. He used to be in expert in tattoos. These books all happen to be the data he recorded in his career. My mother thought I could use them perhaps to figure out what my first tattoo meant. However, I have yet to even receive my first tattoo.

I had hoped that maybe in his research he would have found something about being inkless, but to this day I've read each one of these books at least twice and I haven't found one bit of information about it. Maybe I'm one of a kind. Maybe there is not supposed to be an inkless person. Perhaps I was a mistake.