Five hours in the chair

Elias kept Tuesdays for the long jobs. It was the only day the studio ran with one chair working, no other machines buzzing on the far side of the screen, and he could stay five hours on the same piece without getting up to deal with anybody.

Rita always turned up fifteen minutes early. She brought two coffees from the bakery on the corner, got his wrong every single time, with sugar, and he drank it anyway.

The piece was large. It started at the left shoulder, covered the whole shoulder blade and came down to the waist: fig leaves, a creeper that grew on the wall of her grandmother's house out in the country and that she had photographed badly, on her phone, into the sun, three months before the house went into probate and was sold.

Seven sessions were booked. There were nine.

Every Tuesday followed the same order, and the order exists for a reason.

Rita took her top off behind the screen and lay face down on the bed with a folded towel across the small of her back. Elias changed the film on the armrest, set out the day's cartridges, one liner and two magnums for shading, and squeezed the ink into the caps before he put a glove on, because once the glove is on you touch nothing except skin and machine.

He washed the area with green soap. He shaved it even when there was no hair at all, because stencil will not take on skin with down on it. He laid the transfer, waited two minutes for it to dry and asked her to stand up and check it in the mirror.

Rita checked it every time with the same two words, which were "that's good", and lay back down.

The first hour was the worst. Lining over bone hurts in a way nobody is ready for, and the shoulder blade is bone with almost nothing on top of it. After about forty minutes the body gives up complaining and the two hours in the middle are nearly easy. The last hour goes bad again, from tiredness, not from pain.

Elias knew all of this by heart. He had been tattooing for eleven years and did about twelve large pieces a year, which comes to more than a hundred backs, and a hundred backs teach you the difference between somebody who is coping and somebody who is two minutes from fainting.

Beyond that the job is simple to describe. One hand pulls the skin tight and the other one draws. The hand pulling does not move.

Five hours.

There was a rule about talking that neither of them ever agreed to.

Rita talked in the first hour. She talked about work, about her sister, about the probate that had been dragging since March, about the cousin who showed up with a solicitor after twelve years of not phoning. In the second hour she talked less. In the third she stopped, and what was left was the hum of the rotary, which is low and constant, and the change in her breathing whenever he worked down onto the side of her ribs.

Elias talked while he was lining, because lining takes less of your head. Shading, he went quiet.

Across the nine sessions he found out, without asking a single question, that she had lived in Lisbon for two years and come back, that she sleeps badly, that her father died in 2019, that she does not like her own name.

She found out that he has a seven-year-old daughter, that the studio is half his and half a partner's who rarely comes in, and that he has not tattooed anybody's face since one occasion in 2021 that he never finished telling.

None of that was handed over directly. It all comes out sideways, in the gap between a line and wiping the excess off, which is when a person has no guard up at all, because they have just got through forty minutes of needle.

In the eighth session the air conditioning packed up.

It was February. The engineer could not come until Thursday, so the studio ran on two pedestal fans pushing hot air from one end of the room to the other.

Elias said they could reschedule. Skin with sweat on it will not hold ink properly and the stencil runs off before the first line closes.

Rita said she had booked the day off.

So they worked with the fan turned towards the bed, stopping every twenty minutes to dry the area with paper towel, which was not in the plan and added nearly an hour to the session.

Around four in the afternoon she asked to turn onto her side, because face down, in that heat, she could not get a full breath in.

Turning onto your side changes everything. Face down, the person lying there is looking at a crease in vinyl. On her side, she is looking at whoever is working, and whoever is working has both hands occupied and his face thirty centimetres away.

Elias closed the fill on the lowest leaf over another forty minutes, with her watching him the entire time, which he registered and did not mention. At the end of that section he switched the machine off to change cartridges.

He did not change it.

What stayed on was the fan. The machine sat on the trolley, the pot of ointment stood open, and the lamp on its arm went on pointing at a place where no work at all was being done.

He took the glove off with his teeth, which is the wrong way, the way you are taught out of in your first month in a studio.

The rest happened on the bed, which is sixty centimetres wide and built for one.

The ninth session was a fortnight later, with the unit fixed and the room at twenty-two degrees.

Rita came in fifteen minutes early and brought two coffees. This time his came without sugar, and the subject had not been raised on any of the eight Tuesdays before it.

They worked four hours and closed the outline on the last leaf, the low one on the right, which was all the tattoo still needed.

He wrapped it, went through the healing instructions for the ninth time, took the agreed money and asked her to check it in the mirror.

Rita looked for a long time. She said "that's good", which is what she always said, and then she said she was going to miss Tuesdays.

Elias cleaned the machine before he answered, which took longer than it needed to take.

Then he told her about the mistake.

The low leaf on the right has its stalk turned inward. On a fig the stalk comes off the branch outward, always, and on that leaf it comes off inward. It is his error, made in the previous session, in the stretch where she was lying on her side. He spotted it the following week, at home, zooming in on a photograph.

A tattoo that size takes forty hours of needle and lasts the rest of a person's life. The mistake is half a millimetre across.

"We can cover it with a new leaf over the top," he said.

"Don't cover it."

He did not cover it. The piece was photographed in March for the studio portfolio, flat lighting and no retouching at all, and it is the photograph he sends whenever somebody asks to see back work.