“I’d say so. The back’s a place people see, unless you never take your shirt off. So yeah, I’d say it probably meant something.”
He looked at the bag on the countertop.
“So the tattoo in there came from the guy’s back,” he said.
“‘No round yellow dots, each one about the circumference of a nailhead.”
Pit stood still and pondered this, his face screwed.up as if he were in pain. .
“Ibey got pupils, like eyes would?” he asked.
“No,” I said, glancing at Chuck to see if he was in range of our conversation.
He was sitting on a couch, flipping through a magazine.
“Gosh,” Pit said. “That’s a hard one. No pupils. Can’t think of anything without pupils if it’s an animal or bird of some kind. Sounds to me you aren’t talking flash. More likely it’s custom.”
He swept both hands over his shop, conducting his own orchestra of outrageous design.
“Now all that’s sheets of flash,” he said, “as opposed to a tattoo artist’s original work, like Grime. I’m saying, you can look at some tattoos and recognize a particular style. No different than Van Gogh or Picasso. For example, I could spot a Jack Rudy or Tin Tin anywhere, most beautiful gray work you’ll ever see.”
Pit led me across the shop into what looked like a typical examining room in a doctor’s office. It was equipped with an autoclave, ultrasonic cleaner, surgical soap, Biowrap, A & D ointment, tongue depressors and packs of sterile needles in big glass jars. The actual tattooing machine looked like something an electrologist would use, and there was a cart with squirt bottles of bright paints and caps for mixing. Central to all this was a gynecological chair. I supposed stirrups made it easier to work on legs and other parts of the body I didn’t want to think about.
Pit spread a towel on a countertop, and we pulled on surgical gloves. He switched on a surgical lamp, pulling it close as I unscrewed the lid from the jar, my nose instantly assaulted by formalin’s acrid bite. I dipped into the pink chemical and pulled out the block of skin. It was rubbery, the tissue permanently preserved, and Pit took it from me without pause and held it up in the light. He turned it this way and that and looked at it through a magnifying glass.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I see those little suckers. Yup, there’s claws holding on a branch. If you kinda lift the image out of the background, you can see the tail feathers.”
“A bird?”
“It’s a bird all right,” he said. “Maybe an owl. You know, it’s the eyes that jump out at you, and I think they were bigger than this at one time. The shading gives it away. Right here.”
I leaned closer, his gloved finger moving over the skin in brushstrokes.
“See it?” No.
“It’s very faint. Eyes have dark circles, like a bandit, sort of, kind of uneven, not very skillfully drawn. Someone tried to make them a whole lot smaller, and there’s stripes radiating out from the edges of the bird. You wouldn’t notice it unless you’ve worked with this sort of thing before, because all of it’s so dark, you know, in such bad shape.
“But if you really scrutinize, you can see it’s darker and heavier around the eyes, for lack of anything to call them. Yup. The more I look at it, I think it’s an owl, and the yellow dots are a messy attempt to cover them up by turning them into owl eyes. Or something like owl eyes.”
I was beginning to see the stripes, the feathers in the dark shading he was describing, and the way the bright yellow eyes were lined with dark ink as if someone had wanted to make them smaller.
“Someone gets something with yellow dots, doesn’t want it anymore arid has something else put on top of it,” Pit said. “Since the top layer of skin’s gone, most of the new tattoo-the owl–came off. I guess the needles didn’t go in as deep on that one. But they went in real deep with the yellow dots. A lot deeper than necessary, which tells me two different artists are involved.”