Permanent Ink

Déjà vu is a feeling. The common phenomenon of feeling like this present moment has been lived through before.

When Rika was a child, she used to try and change things. If she felt that uncanny sensation on her skin, she’d try and break out of the pattern, do something totally unexpected and completely out of character, to thwart the gods for showing her their hand. But every time, things happened just as she forgot she remembered.

The reference photo was intimate. A young man, shirtless, half-spooled in sheets, the morning sun crawling through unkept curls. One eye was pressed into the soft cradle of his hand, but the other was warm and lazy, a spark of mischief and his sleepy smile breathing deep affection for the lens so close to his face. The photographer meant to catch him in slumber. Instead, she’d caught him at his best. “Where do you want it?” Rika asked.

The canvas had some ink scattered across her limbs, but the forearm she held out was bare, smooth, and sunless. “Right here. I sleep on my arm, and he’ll be the first thing I see when I wake up.”

“I can see you’ve given this a lot of thought.” Rika held the image beside the slender space. “With the time we have, the amount of detail might have to be simplified. Can you tell me the most important thing you want from your tattoo?”

“His expression,” the canvas said immediately. “The way he looks at me.”

Rika didn’t have to ask who this man was to her. It was so clear, from that misty eye, that they had once been in love. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

Déjà vu is a feeling. The phenomenon of feeling like this present moment has been lived through before.

The formulaic structure of the reality show didn’t give Rika that magical sensation of seeing again something that hadn’t happened yet. Instead, there was the numb ennui of knowing what would happen because it kept happening again and again and again. Not just in the scheduled elements of when things were filmed, when PAs came around with lunch orders, when you had time for the bathroom and when you’d missed your chance.

The people around her had already fallen into the same classic patterns of showbiz politics. Taking space instead of sharing it. Spilling sycophantic praise on entitled execs. Being dicks in front of cameras and flashing a cutesy ‘nothing personal’ that was supposed to make it all okay. There was no measurable advantage in behaving that way, but people did, because that’s what people do. Quite a dim conclusion, given that this was only the second week.

Rika knew she wasn’t going to win. The show was in its sixteenth season, and the winner had been a white man thirteen times. This didn’t necessarily mean that the judges (the producers) were picking white men on purpose, but it did show there was a certain cultural advantage. The contestants, every season, were very diverse, every demographic represented. As the eliminations went on, though, the more colorful candidates just went away.

“I’m so glad I got you for this,” the canvas said. “I was so nervous about getting somebody who doesn’t understand my skin type.”

Rika smiled, her eyes fixed on the work in front of her. “I’m so glad I got you as a canvas; you have beautiful skin. One of the hardest things about memorial tattoos is people wanting a very specific, lifelike portrait on a surface that’s aged or sun damaged or a little looser after weight loss.”

“Not a problem I have.”

Rika chuckled. “I thought you had some scarring, but those are body mods, right?”

“Good eye,” the canvas said, knowing better than to move. “My fiancé was out walking on Western Ave, and all of a sudden, pop-pop-pop-pop! Them bastards didn’t even hit who they was aiming at, but they hit my man five times.”

“Yikes.” Rika sat back. “That’s how he passed?”

The canvas shook her head. “One of the bullets hit his spine and his nerves got shredded. Doctors kept pushing opioids until he got hooked. He started selling oxy to buy heroin, got kicked out of nursing school. Tried going to rehab, but everybody made up his whole backstory based on the color of his skin. The way people looked at him, he felt like he'd failed his own identity. Anyone else, it would have been a tragedy and a shame. But a young black man? That’s déjà vu.”

Déjà vu is a feeling. A common phenomenon, feeling like this present moment has been lived through before.

Like a good canvas who knew how to sit through the pain, she kept still, and did not wipe away the tear rolling down her smooth-skinned face. “I asked for my scars to show that shooter hit me, too. If they was gonna judge him for the skin he lived in, I figured they could judge me just the same. But it wasn’t enough. As hard as I stood with him, I couldn’t stand for him.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I chose this picture,” the canvas said. “So I can see he loved me. That just…love alone was not enough.”

Rika killed the machine. “Let’s take a little break.”

Pushing up her wrist band, Rika indulged in the ritualized washing of her hands. Water as hot as she could stand, lots of antiseptic soap. Lather between the palms, up over and around the wrists, down the back of the hands, in between the fingers, each individual digit and the muscle of the thumb. She dragged her fingertips across her palms, flushing the suds beneath her fingernails. Just like they taught her at nursing school. A million discarded futures ago.

Sitting back down at the bench, Rika said, “Okay. The next—”

“Rika!” one of the cameramen hissed. “Your wrist band!”

“Oh.” Rika pulled the fabric back into place. “Okay, the next section extends into the gutter. That’s a sensitive area, so tap out if you need to.”

“I’ll be fine,” the canvas said. “What’s with the wrist band?”

Glancing at the cameras, Rika lowered her voice a little bit. “It’s a censorship thing. This show’s pretty permissive about cuss words, but not about hate speech.”

“You have hate speech on your wrist?”

“Only what other people call me.” Rika lifted the fabric for just a second before it snapped back into place. “There were three kids in my high school who were half Latino, half Asian, and we all got called the same thing. We thought it sounded like onomatopoeia in a comic book, y’know, pop, snickt, ka-ching—”

“Got it,” the canvas said. “Explains the font. But why would you want that on your body?”

“I don’t know. We were fifteen,” Rika said. “Felt like we were taking it back.”

The canvas watched the needle with a thoughtful expression. “You want to brand yourself with what other people say?”

“Thought I could change the meaning of the word. Felt like no one else was going to.”

Déjà vu is a feeling. The common phenomenon of feeling that this present moment has been lived through before.

When they flashed the image up on the projector, it punched Rika in her butterflied gut. Over the smooth faun surface of her canvas’s skin, her fiancé smiled with one half-lidded eye, sunlight streaming over his young, young face.

“This is a beautiful tattoo,” one of the judges said. “It’s legible. There’s a great illusion of depth, all that soft shading fading into the background really pushes the face forward.”

“This was a difficult pose and a difficult canvas,” another judge said. “But you managed to get clean lines and saturated blacks. That’s really going to hold up over time as this skin ages.”

The third judge leaned forward. “My favorite part of this tattoo is the light on the small details in the hair, and the bright reflect in that eye. You really capture that contrast, even though you didn’t use any white ink as a highlight.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” the fourth judge said. “This is a bullet proof tattoo.”

Rika, for the first time in many minutes, breathed. She was safe. She was going to the next round. “Thank you.”

She turned to go back to her mark with the other contestants, but a director stopped her. “Um, let’s do that again,” he said. “Only this time, could you bow?”

The butterflies dropped Rika’s stomach, letting it plunge through cold guts. “What?”

“I just think that would be so cute,” the director said. “If you could, like, do a little bow. Like from where you’re from.”

“I’m from Brooklyn.”

“No, but, like, from from.”

“We don’t bow in Brooklyn.”

The director crossed his arms over his chest. “Hey, we’re trying to make a show. You’re trying to win a competition. Everybody has rules, alright?”

A tight smile ticked up Rika’s lips. “I’ll give you one take.”

“Great.” The director turned back to the camera.

In the many, many interviews that followed, he would insist it was a routine take, one of hundreds, over and over and over again. Only this time, he was watching for the bow. And completely missed the ink around an unbanded wrist.

Déjà vu is a feeling. That’s all it is.