The Veiled Lady

The throat is a delicate thing, but it’s not the worst place I’ve ever gotten a tattoo.

Foot is the worst. By far. Especially the top of the foot and the ankle. My sister tried to argue that ribs hurt more, but when I asked which one she’d rather get covered, she shut right up. So that settled that. I don’t even plan on getting my feet touched up, we’re just going to let those fade into oblivion.

Throat is definitely more nerve-wracking though. At least with my feet I knew the artist had those suckers pinned down hard enough I couldn’t even twitch. With this I’m worried every time I clear my throat or swallow that I’ve wreaked irreparable destruction on Lacey’s careful work, and something about how she wipes the rag down over and over is making me need to swallow every two seconds.

Also, it’s indescribably loud. I can hear the brzz of the needle in my eyeballs.

But I’ve earned this tattoo; I’m eighteen years sober today. It’s become something of a tradition to get a new tattoo on my anniversary, and I figured – since my sober self is old enough to get a tattoo this year – I’d go bigger than usual and get something I’ve wanted for a long time: the Veiled Lady.

Not the one you see everywhere with the crown of what I’m sure is supposed to be flowers but has always looked more to me like chanterelle mushrooms. No—the version carved by Pietro Rossi. I saw the statue on a class trip to the Gibbes in tenth grade, and I had the thought that she looked as pissed off as I felt.

“You still with me, C?”

I blink open my eyes, belatedly realizing the buzzsaw in my skull had gone quiet. I was hearing the muffled sound of the music in the shop through my earbuds; my playlist must have ended at some point. I didn’t care for the detached piano melody.

“Yeah,” I say, taking advantage of the break to adjust my position on the bench. The most painful part of this was definitely the awkward position Lacey had me laying. I added in a raspy voice that the top of my ass was numb.

“So long as you’re conscious. You don’t get to nap before I do. Here.” She hands me a paper cup of water. I drink obediently, just as I’ve done every other time. Lacey had a permanent ‘don’t test me’ face, and I already knew her to take the matter of hydrating more seriously than a fish.

“One more stint I think,” she says, cranking her chin out to the side to pop her neck, then asks if I’d mind her grabbing a smoke before the final stretch.

And of course I don’t. Whatever keeps her hands steady, I say. My skin has cooled by the time she returns, and the needle has more bite when we start up again. Eventually I find my flow and relax into the sharp humming sensation.

I don’t hear much of this playlist either.

We finish just after seven hours, and I tip Lacey the usual thirty percent plus another ten percent for doing a single sit. I shiver when I finally walk out into the October evening, despite the heat radiating off my neck. I walk to the end of the block, buy a fat burrito with extra carne asada, and eat it on the bus home. My skin feels a little tighter with every swallow, and I wish I’d thought to buy a soda too.

My sheets are a terrifying scene the next morning, especially my pillow case, where the black ink seeped from my wounded throat and turned it into queen-sized Rorschach test. I can’t help but stare at the dark blotch until my brain finds an image of a snarling dog. Then I think it looks more like one of those fancy glasses an upscale place will put a whiskey sour in, and then I’m stripping my bed as fast as I can manage.

I throw everything in the laundry on a hot cycle and a lot of bleach. The ink stains are on my pillow too, and I’m pretty much an idiot for not realizing that would happen before, but I’m resigned to double case it until I can justify spending the money on a new one. (For some reason this is easier to do when spending five months savings on a tattoo than sixty bucks on a new pillow.)

(Really though – sixty bucks is ridiculous, but that’s how much you have to spend if you don’t want all the life beaten out of the thing after a couple months.)

I don’t notice I’m humming that creepy piano melody while remaking the bed until my cat jumps up to meow in my face about it—he’s not a big fan of me making any noise unless it’s the tinny scratch of peeling back the top on a can of wet food.

“Sorry, Derp,” I say, even though his legal name is Bartholomew the Great and Noble, because he’s much more of a Derp.

Derp is disinclined to leave the half-made bed, so I abandon the task to start a pot of coffee and take a shower. I grab a gray washcloth that I don’t mind ruining from the hall closet and get the bathroom faucet running to let the water warm. I run the washcloth under the warm water until its heavy and wet, then ring it of excess water, and start by tilting my head back and laying the whole cloth flat over the blurry mess of ink that was my neck. I let the warm water soak there for a moment and then gently move the cloth in circles to gather up the ink that had bled out and dried overnight, then wipe it away to reveal the shrouded face underneath—

“Jesus fuck!” I scream and drop the washcloth down my front. I back up too fast and knock my head against the corner of the open bathroom door.

“MraOW!” Comes a protest at my ankle.

I glance down at Derp and grab the washcloth before he could get his claws stuck in it, then stand back up to look in the mirror again. I slam my knee against the cabinet under the sink trying to get up close. I touch the pink skin beneath the black and gray image of the veiled lady gently as my heart calms.

She looks just as she ought to, though I would have sworn when I’d first looked her eyes were open. They had been vivid and round, and staring straight out at me.

I also could have sworn I’d seen her smile…

“Apparently I need more sleep,” I mutter at my reflection, then rinse the washcloth and finish cleaning up my neck.

Lacey did a killer job of it. Even with the swelling and my pinkened skin from wiping it clean with the cloth, it looks wicked. And I’m suddenly excited to show her off. I abandon the pot of coffee I just made and decide to treat myself to breakfast at the good diner up the road. I text my best friend, Josie, and invite her along. She responds with seven praying hands emojis and says she’ll meet me there in twenty.

The inside of the Red Raven Diner is bedecked with black cobwebs and they’ve swapped out all the pictures on the wall with ones with should photoshopped in. Carlo – who I’ve never seen not working even though the Red Raven is open twenty four hours, and I think might legitimately sleep in the attic – shows me to a window booth opposite the wall of mirrors. I turn over two mugs for coffee, and they’re filled by a passing waitress with devil horns and a fake tail almost immediately. She wishes me a happy Halloween in a chirpy voice, and I can’t decide whether this is completely in or out of character for a supposed devil. Either way I return the sentiment.

A twenty-something phi-beta-something yells, “Sweet ink!” at me through the window pane while walking past, and I can’t help but roll my eyes.

Josie shows up holding a cupcake with a wax “18” stuck in the top and gives me a big hug. “We didn’t get to celebrate yesterday but looks like it was worth it!” She slides into the bench opposite me and tells me to lift my chin. “Delightfully unsettling,” she says. “I love it. Did it hurt terribly?”

Josie isn’t a tattoo person. She tells people it’s because she doesn’t see the point in getting a tattoo people will barely be able to see, seeing as she has dark brown skin. But I’m pretty sure it’s more because she’s just an old school gal. She was a debutant, and says things like ‘ I’d bet my buttons,’ unironically.

I tell her that it really didn’t hurt that much, and I tell her the story about defeating my sister in the argument about the most painful place to get a tattoo, and she laughs like it’s the first time she’s ever heard me tell it, even though I know its not.

“Well, eighteen is nothing to snuff at,” she says to me. “I’m so proud of you.”

We split the cupcake, laughing at how the icing stains our mouths blue. I stand in my seat to see myself in the mirrors and I startle when I see the Veiled Lady standing on the sidewalk behind me, tall and grinning and shrouded in that long white veil. I whip around to look at where she was standing, but there’s no one there.

“You alright?” Josie asks. “You look white as a ghost.”

“Yeah,” I say, distantly, then sit back down and sip my coffee. A gargoyle comes to top it off a second later.

Josie tells me about her night out dancing, and about how her step daughter changed her mind about what she wants to be for Halloween for a third time, causing Josie to spend most of her night and early morning designing, pinning, and sewing a dark jester costume. She orders the bloody-berry crepes and skip the specials and have the farmers breakfast, which is just potatoes and whatever vegetables they have an excess of in the kitchen with a couple fried eggs on top.

I don’t say much the rest of the meal.

Before heading home I round the block twice, looking for some sign of the Veiled Lady. I know I likely look a bit crazy, but what I’d seen in the mirror had just seemed so real.

There’s times you see something strange, but you can sort it out: I just watched that scary movie and my nerves are on a knife’s edge; I stayed up too late reading Stephen King; my cat is behind the curtain again and the stretched out shadow passing by scared the bejeezus out of me. But this hadn’t been like that. There had been a full person standing in the window, staring through the window, staring into the mirror, staring at me like I was a fresh meal on a hot plate.

I can’t stop checking my front door to see that it’s still locked. I manage to finish making the bed by the generosity of Derp. I try to take a nap but I’m far too jittery. I go down a Wikipedia hole on my phone that starts with reading the whole history of the Veiled Lady and ends with me getting frustrated after searching every combination of words that mean ‘haunted tattoo’ I can think of but am unable to find anything but stupid Buzzfeed listicles. I switch to my phone camera, put it to selfie mode, and look at her.

Her eyes are open again.

Somehow I manage not to scream. Somehow I manage enough mental faculty to take a picture as proof.

Somehow I know before I look up that she’ll be standing at the foot of my bed.

I scream as I scramble out of the covers and at the same time hurl my phone across the room at her.

The Veiled Lady swipes a hand through the air, making the edges of her shroud billow, and my phone is thrown sideways. It shatters the mirror on my wall and falls to the floor.

I don’t think. I grab the next closest thing to me and throw that too. My pillow. A book. A lamp. She swipes aside the first, but I throw the latter two before she can raise an arm again—

Except they fly right through her.

I hurtle out of my bedroom, cursing. Derp hisses when I almost step on his tail but I’m too busy trying not to die.

That’s when I stop. I’m standing in front of the fireplace, a few steps away from my front door.

Maybe, I think. Maybe she’s not dangerous?  

    I turn around to face her, my whole body running cold at the sight of her in her long shroud. There is something in the way she drifts toward me that screams malevolent spirit, but I take a breath and try to tell myself I shouldn’t jump to conclusions.

    “Wh-what do you want?” I ask pathetically.

    She smiles.

    And then I’m choking.

    My vision goes white and blurry and I struggle for one gasp of air. It takes a panicked second to realize something has been brought down over my face and wrapped tight around my neck, blocking any air from getting to me. The Veiled Lady has wrapped her veil around my face, only I can breathe through it about as well as I might breathe through a plastic bag.

    I revert tactics and grab the first thing near me, but I don’t throw it. Instead I get a firm grip around the handle and I swing out like a player at bat.

    The iron poker goes right through her, but this time something else happens – she’s dispelled. Like she’d been only a sheet on a line, and I’d torn it down, the Veiled Lady vanished in a ripple of gauzy fabric.

    I collapsed to my knees, swallowing air desperately.

    Before I think better of it, I recover my phone from the bedroom and run to catch the bus.

    Lacey is not happy to see me, and she’s less happy when I ask her to cover the tattoo she’d just spent seven hours on yesterday. She asks if I’m high, and I try to explain that I’m sober as a church but she’s having none of it.

    To be fair, I’m not sure I’d believe my story either, if I wasn’t living it.

    “I think it’s the eyes,” I say frantically. “Just cover the eyes. Just put a big black bar over the eyes.”

    But she refuses in typical Lacey fashion, which leaves no room for argument. She thinks I regret the tattoo – which I do, but not for the typical reasons someone regrets getting a tattoo. Or she doesn’t believe that I’m sober. I try showing her the photo I took, but the screen is cracked, and I can’t so much as unlock it.

    “Let it finish healing,” she tells me. “Then come back and we can discuss changes.”

    I plead my case one more time, but I’m turned away, just as I’m turned away by the other three shops I try.

    So I go home.

    I stop at the store. I keep my eyes on the ground the whole time. I don’t dare look at anything that could be the least bit reflective. If all the clerks weren’t checked out teens, someone probably would have thought me up to something shady.

    I was at least that lucky.

    It’s black out by the time I get home, and unlocking my door without lifting my head proves to be harder than I thought, but eventually I’m inside. Then I set to work.

    I still keep my head down as I stack sticks and then wood in the grate, add in crumpled pages of an old Costco mailer I found in my recycling, then I light it in four places with a long match, and I tend the fire like it’s my job.

    It’s only when the poker has been sitting in the popping flames long enough to turn a hot, glowing red that I finally stand, and look out the window.

    My harrowed reflection looks back at me from the dark glass, as does the Veiled Lady. Her eyes are stark, and I can feel the moment she appears in the room behind me, turning the entire place cold, despite the fire.

    I reach down and grab the still-dark end of the poker.

I pull the red inches of it from the hearth.

And I take a deep, deep breath.