“I was training seriously in tattoo work before I got sick,” Erin told me as we walked, flexing the fingers of her right hand almost unconsciously, like she was checking they still worked. “My hand control changed. For a while, I couldn’t even manage a straight line.”
She described it plainly, without asking for pity — the months of rehabilitation, the adaptive grips, the hours spent practicing on synthetic skin that never once looked like it was going to become anything. Then, finally, an instructor at the tattoo studio the center partnered with had cleared her to attempt one small design on a real, willing volunteer, under close supervision.
Erin had refused.
“Why?” I asked.
She glanced at Brad before she answered me. “Plastic doesn’t flinch,” she said. “It can’t hurt. It can’t pull away. It can’t regret trusting me.”
Brad, she explained, had been working at the center back then doing maintenance and general support — fixing chairs, hauling supplies, the kind of unglamorous work nobody notices until it stops happening. He’d overheard her arguing with her instructor in the hallway. And instead of walking past, he’d rolled up his sleeve.
“Okay,” he’d said. “Do mine.”
Erin had assumed he was joking. He wasn’t.
With her instructor standing beside her the entire time, she had tattooed one small, imperfect sunflower onto the forearm of a man she barely knew. The stem wobbled. One petal came out crooked. An accidental dot of ink landed just beside it that was never supposed to be there.
“I thought I’d ruined it,” Erin said, her voice catching even now, years later.
Brad had looked down at his own arm, still bleeding slightly, still stinging, and said the only thing that mattered. “Looks like a sunflower to me.”
Erin’s eyes filled again as she told it. I looked over at my husband, who was suddenly, intently studying the floor, as if the story embarrassed him. Nothing about what I’d just heard made that reaction make sense to me — not yet.
Then Erin pulled a photograph down from the wall and pressed it into my hands.
A much younger Brad stood beside a worktable, hair too long, sporting a mustache so aggressively bad that I momentarily forgot the gravity of the moment entirely.
“Brad.”
He glanced over and winced at what I was looking at. “That mustache was a difficult period,” he muttered.
Molly rose up on her toes to see. “I like it.”
“You’re no longer in the will,” he told her, and she grinned like that was a prize.
But my eyes had already drifted lower in the photograph, to his rolled-up sleeve, to Erin sitting beside him with fierce concentration on her face while a licensed instructor watched over her shoulder. The sunflower in the photo was fresh, raw, crooked from the very first minute of its existence.
And he had never fixed it. Never covered it. Never once, in all our years together, taken a single step toward removing it.
He had kept it exactly the way a frightened, recovering woman had made it.
Erin moved to a second photograph. Brad again — this time a different man working carefully on a small geometric design near his elbow. A third photo: a woman laughing beside him over a crooked, lopsided moon.
“How many?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
Brad rubbed the back of his neck, refusing to meet my eyes. “Not that many.”
“Brad.”
“Eight, maybe.”
“Nine,” Erin corrected.
“One barely counts.”
“Your skin disagrees,” Erin said, and despite everything, I felt the corner of my mouth twitch.
