"Okay,. Taxi, tummy rub," Pit said in a cooing voice.
Taxi rolled over, legs in the air, and her master squatted and began rubbing her stomach.
"You know"-he looked up at Chuck and me-"these dogs aren't bad unless the owners want 'em to be. They're just big babies. Aren't you, Taxi? I named her `Taxi' because some taxi driver came in here a year back and wanted a tattoo. Said he'd trade me a pit bull puppy for a Grim Reaper with his ex-wife's name under it. So that's what I did, didn't I, girl? Kind of a joke that she's a Pit and I am, too. We ain't related."
Pit's shop was a world I didn't know and couldn't have imagined, and I'd visited some very strange places in my career. Walls were covered with flash, every example edgeto-edge. There were thousands of Indians, winged horses, dragons, fish, frogs and cultist symbols that meant nothing to me. Pit's Trust No One. and Been There,Fucked That opinions were everywhere. Plastic skulls grimaced from shelves and tables, and tattoo magazines were placed about for brave hearts to flip through while they waited for the needle.
Oddly, what I would have found so offensive just an hour ago suddenly took on the authority and truth of a creed. People like Pit and probably much of his clientele were outlaws who bucked anything that took away the right of people to be who and what they are. Out of place in all of this was the dead man whose flesh I was carrying in a jar. There was nothing countercultural or defiant about someone dressed in Armani clothes and crocodile shoes.
"How did you get into this?" I asked Pit.
Chuck began browsing sheet-flash as if he were wandering through an art museum. I set the bag on the countertop by the cash register.
"Graffiti," Pit replied. "I bring a lot of that into my style, sort of like Grime at Primal Urge out in San Fran, not that I'm saying I'm anywhere near as good as him. But if you combine bright, more graffitilike images with the bolder lines of the old school, that's me."
He tapped his finger on a framed photograph of a nude woman smiling slyly, arms provocatively crossed over her breasts. She had a sunset behind a lighthouse on her belly.
"Now that lady there;" he said, "she comes in here with her boyfriend and says he's giving her a tattoo for her birthday. She starts out with this little itty-bitty butterfly on her hip, scared to death. After that she comes back every week for another one."
"Whys" I asked.
"It's addicting."
"Most people get more than one?"
"Most who get just one want to tuck it somewhere, usually out of sight. Like a heart on a butt or a boob. In other words, that one tattoo has special meaning. Or maybe the person got it when they were drunk-that happens, too, but not in my shop. I won't touch you if you smell like booze."
"If someone had one tattoo on his back and nowhere else on his body, as best I can tell? Important? Maybe something more than bravado or being drunk?" I asked.
"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 amp; 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."
He studied the block of skin some more.
"You can never really cover up an old tattoo," he resumed. "But if you know what you're doing, you can work over and around it so the eye is taken away from it. That's the trick. I guess you could almost call it an, optical illusion."
"Is there any way we can figure out what the yellow eyes might originally have been part of?" I asked him.
Pit looked disappointed and sighed.
"It's just a damn shame it's in such bad shape," he muttered, placing the skin on the towel and blinking several times. "Man, those fumes will get you. How do you work around that all the time?"
"Very, very carefully,":I said. "Would you mind if I use your phone?"
"Help yourself."
I stepped behind the counter, keeping an uneasy eye on Taxi as she sat up in her bed. She stared at me as if daring me to make one move she didn't like.
"It's okay," I told her in a soothing voice. "Pit? Is it all right if I page someone and give him this, number?"
"It ain't a secret. Help yourself."
"You're a good girl." I encouraged Taxi to be one as I stepped around the counter to use.the phone.