We were doing ink together. We were doing massive, insane, unnecessarily massive amounts of ink. And we loved it. He did other things too. Like his friend Tom behind my back, but who’s counting. I couldn’t keep track of all his extracurricular activities.
We were living together. Well, living together is a very broad term. We were fucking, we were sporadically sleeping, we were infrequently eating, and we were doing ink.
There were only two things my mother really disapproved of: Tattoos and misplacing things. Well, she’ll be incredibly proud of me now. Doing ink like a damn junkie and misplacing my boyfriend all the time.
You know what an addiction is? Neither did we. But we were definitely addicted to ink. It didn’t seem right to have all that empty flesh on your body and all that ink out there in those beautiful, vibrant colors. You have a problem when you want to stop and you can’t. We could have stopped at any time, but we didn’t want to. We didn’t have a damn problem, okay? Now that we have established that, we can move on.
I knew we were addicted, but I still didn’t fully understand what an addiction was. What I did know was what people do with them. People use addiction to fill holes.
Real and figurative holes. A pill in the mouth, a new reality in the mind. Ink is like that. We loaded every inch of our skin with colorful designs to fill other less tangible voids. For me, it was just boredom. I don’t know what his excuse was. He was just mentally unstable, I guess.
If I can be honest, it was not just boredom for me, and it was not just ink. I was in love with him, and I was ready to be whatever he wanted me to be.
He was a tattoo artist, so I became his muse and canvas. “There’s no risk of getting addicted to ink,” he told me. And I guess that’s kind of true. But there was a risk in becoming addicted to him. The tingling sensation, the erotic pain of each puncture, and the mesmerizing buzzing sound in my ears could not compete with the breathtaking sensation of him taking hold of me before gently inserting the needle, and the intoxicatingly evil smell of blood and ink on his hands.
© Agostina Biritos 2023-05-21