Tattoo Short Story
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“As you walk along the pier, you can see a girl that is standing over the barrier. You were just an arm’s length of her but it was all unexpected, the events unfolded so quickly. You had no idea what she was doing. The first thing you notice was her dress and her intricate tattoos. All of a sudden she turned around because she heard your footsteps. And that’s when you see it, the sorrow on her face and the tears in her eyes. You froze completely, awestruck by her beauty.”
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Standing over the barrier over the water’s edge, I tried to turn my head in the slightest way to be polite, yet my eyes and vision were fixed all over her full bodied tattoos. I felt that the catharsis of a daring individual to be tattooed permanently like this must be a step of bravery to commit to these dragon tattoos swimming all over her back and between her breasts. She chose to wear a semi-permeable dress and although there was a corset for privacy in the usual areas, the cloth of her stomach and entire back was translucent to reveal the beautiful Chinese dragon designs inked deep, black and white only, but luscious depiction that hailed the ancient drawings of such with more modern details.
She was Chinese, that part I unconsciously saw the moment her face turned slightly to the side as I was approaching her and she heard my footsteps nearing her at the dock. Her face was like a China doll, perfect, and her eyes wide like people in awe, but never with emotion did she blink and look at others. What if this was just her guise, and there was some inner savagery in her that was masked by the prototype, plastic-surgery Chinese girl?
She was a man, actually. This realization didn’t come in a flash, but rather like the slow peeling back of silk—layer by layer, beneath the illusion of grace and beauty. Up close, you could see it: the subtle angularity of the jaw hidden beneath soft makeup, the faint rigidity in posture, the quiet tension in the shoulders that didn’t match the softness of the dress. There was no doubt now. She had once been a soldier. Perhaps she still was. This was the ostentatious poetry that I made up in my head, to ease the feeling of suspicion that she was someone who she was not, and in that, a great legion of history.
It was impossible to question her age; she must have been as old as a vampire. She definitely was that pale, and oh yeah, she was not a she, she was a man. Slowly as the darkness of the sky weathered over her, her long black hair, straight and reaching to her waist, receded, and she gained the hard face of a Chinese soldier.
She was like a terracotta soldier, but the first one to come to life. There were many imaginings of what they looked like in color, but that was the superficial wonder of us modern people, and it really had a taste of being foreign to China, or else respect would prevent us from wondering such an aesthetic question.
Alas, the terracotta soldiers were not stone themselves, but rather people, and she was one of them. He watches you, not with threat, not even with curiosity. But with the quiet indifference of a guardian who has stood too long to care who now walks the earth. In your mind, you recall the lines you once read in a museum placard—the Terracotta Army was never meant to fight, only to watch. To wait.
Yet here he was, reborn in flesh, wrapped in dragons, sorrow in his eyes like a country mourned too long.
The tattoos, you now understood, were not decoration. They were seals. Words. Memory. At that time dragons were real, and legions lead them. They bound the old soul within the vessel, honored it, disguised it. They told the story of dynasties long collapsed, of vows made beneath ancient oaths. The ink was his confession. His penance. It was of the modern times to boast truths like these on skin, and words that left lips, but no hold any secret existences of powerful, ageless worth. Dragons weren’t real, everyone could say specifically, but they were. They existed as the ward of the most mysterious Chinese in the world.
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