Sharing Tattoos at the ER

Sharing Tattoos at the ER

So after waiting an hour in the emergency room, some nurse wearing an orange Hawaiian blouse calls me in through the double steel doors and has me step a scale on a scale. She jots down my weight and measures my heart rate and blood pressure. Then she ushers me into a tiny room and tells me to remove my shirt and have a seat on the crinkly green paper that covers a bench.

While waiting another half hour for the doctor to show up, I stare at the crazy instruments locked inside a glass case against the wall. There are rolls of gauze bandages and long rubber hoses and lots of shiny silver things, including a huge tong-like device I figure must be used for spreading apart your ribs. Above the torture devices is a glass cabinet full of medicines. I’ll bet they’re good potent medicines, too. I hop off the bench and try to open the cabinet, but it’s locked. Back on the bench, I spend some time reading the quit smoking and watch your weight and diabetes flyers that decorate the walls.

Anyway, the doctor, this guy whose stethoscope dangles around his neck and whose jeans are visible below the hem of his green smock, he comes in with his clipboard and stops several feet in front me. Adjusting his glasses, he says, “What the hell happened to you?”

Having already given all this information to the triage nurse, I roll my eyes and shrug.

He comes over and places the tips of his fingers on the red welts on my chest. I wince and his fingers retreat. “How’d this happen?” the doctor asks.

So I let out some air and begin to tell him that me and Lucy had just finished smoking some high grade dope in bed when I very carefully reached down and removed the tiny heart tattoo from her ankle. “That heart was really something,” I say to the doctor. “Pulsing like crazy and bleeding all over my hand.”

The doctor, he just nods and jots this stuff down on an official looking form stuck to his clipboard. He gestures with his chin and asks, “But what about the lashes on your chest?”

“Hold your gas, doc. I’m getting to that,” I say.

He nods again and I go on to tell him how after replacing Lucy’s heart tattoo on her ankle my hand traveled up her smooth leg, all the way past the curve of her ass to the butterfly tattoo on her hip bone. I carefully removed that, too. Cupping the butterfly in my hands, I felt its wings fluttering against my palms.

“This is really cool,” I told Lucy. “What would happen if I crushed it?”

Lucy said, “Better not.”

I opened my hands and the butterfly shot out and flitted over to the lamp on the nightstand. It got under the shade and we could see its shadow circling the bulb behind the shade. I laughed and told Lucy, “That guy at the tattoo joint robbed you, girl. They gave you a moth instead of a butterfly.”

Lucy, well she got all upset and threw the covers off of us. She was going to climb out of bed, but I started to poke at her, you know, jabbing the bony plate between her breasts and sticking my fingers under her arms. Anyway, a pissed off Lucy reached over and yanked the tattoo that was wrapped around my right bicep. She pinched it between the barbs, and reared back and started lashing me with it.

The doctor, he’s just kind of looks down at his clipboard and taps it with the eraser of his pencil.

“Don’t believe me, man?” I say.

Tugging on an earlobe, the doctor says, “Sure I believe you.” After a moment he adds, “Well, I’m going to get a nurse in here so we can get you cleaned up. Then we’ll release you.”

“Don’t I need a tetanus shot or some valium or pan-killers or nothing?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “You’ll be all right.” He stares at my chest. His head tilts and his eyes narrow. “What is that?” he asks.

I drop my chin and tap the yellow tattoo below my left nipple. “It’s a half-moon,” I say.

The doctor shakes his head again and leans in close. “Really good job.”

“Yeah,” I say. I clap a hand over the half-moon and remove it from my chest. I raise it above my head and it floats up to the ceiling where it hangs, its glow falling over everything in the tiny room. The doctor‘s shadow stretches and buckles up the wall behind him. The crescent moon reflects like golden twins from the pupils of the doctor‘s wide, wide eyes.