The Tattoo Artist by Jill Ciment

human bone or tortoise-shell, then affixed to tiny bamboo rakes. The points are then dipped in ink and positioned against the skin. With a stone mallet, the artist strikes the rake, piercing the skin and injecting the ink deep into the dermis. By adjusting the needles incrementally after each tap, hundreds of dots are engraved every minute. Sometimes, for a thicker, truer line, the equivalent of an embossed etching, the skin itself is cut and the dye rubbed into the wound with a pepper leaf to promote scarring. When the pain becomes insufferable, the artist sings to his subject.
    Ishmael never sang for me.
    Each dawn, he arrived with his pots of freshly mixed ink, accompanied by the old woman. Sometimes another old woman appeared, too, but she sat at the far end of the hull, weeping.
    Holding my head between his knees, Ishmael would work on a patch of my chin, or a turn of my lip, for the better part of the morning, while the old woman dabbed up my blood with bark cloths, then cleaned the incisions with poultices of leaves. When Ishmael finally set down his tools, she fed me my only nourishment, bowls of their dishwater elixir, through a hollow reed. My lips were so swollen that I couldn’t open my mouth.
    I presumed I was being readied for my execution, that the preparations entailed being mummified first in Ishmael’s art, or perhaps he was merely inscribing my crime on my lips for all eternity.
    When he and the old woman failed to come one morning, my gratitude at being spared the pain was qualified by my fear that only while my pain had lasted was I allowed to live.
    I managed to stand up and walk to where the shade of the boat ended and the gas-flame-blue sky began. My jaw felt as heavy as an anvil, my cranium as light as helium.
    Whenever I explored the area around my mouth (I couldn’t help but touch it. Wouldn’t you have been curious?), the skin felt as if it were smoldering. I knew I should run for my life— at the very least, crawl into the jungle and hide. I accepted that the next soul I saw would be my executioner.
    Instead, I sat down and did nothing. I told myself I was too drugged and weak to flee, in too much pain to cope with the arduous demands of staying alive in the jungle. In truth, I think I preferred death to disfigurement.
    Before the day was out, the old woman brought Philip to me. She led him by his wrist while he walked behind her. He could walk, though just barely.
    The sun was setting at their backs. Philip was only silhouette and fiery outline. Even so, I could see they’d done something to his face, too. The old woman marched him closer. For a moment, he looked like my old Philip walking toward me under the striped shadows of the el train. She stood him directly before me.
    Six bars—lampblack, ruler-straight—ran the length of his face.
    “Sara, is that you?” he asked.
    I couldn’t make myself speak.
    “I can’t see.” His eyes were swollen shut. (Even his eyelids had been tattooed.) He pawed the air, then turned his head from side to side. “They promised me you’d be here.”
    I stood and encircled his gaunt waist with my arms, pressed my brow—the only area of my face that didn’t ache—against his chest and shoulder. I even kissed his throat with my swollen lips. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” I said, though I couldn’t make myself look at him as I said it. “I thought they’d killed you.”
    Then I stepped back to see exactly what they had done to him. The black lines started at his hairline (even his eyebrows were tattooed), ran over his features (even his nostrils were tattooed), and stopped at his jaw, eradicating everything that was Philip in between.
    I was so muddled that I was sure the ink would rub off. I dragged my fingertip across his damp, striped forehead. When I lifted it off, I fully expected it to be smudged. It was clean.
    “You’re hurting me! Stop!” His voice emanated from the back of the cage. “Sara, I think Ishmael blinded