Heart and Yes
I remember the buzz of the needle from my first and second
tattoos—that metallic rattle, high-pitched. It makes the
muscles in my neck twitch, remembering the nagging pain
that goes with the buzzing sound. I got my first tattoo during
my senior year of high school on Casimir Pulaski day, a
school holiday in Chicago thanks to the large Polish
community. I told my parents I was going to do it, but they
weren’t too worried. I’d been fainting at the sight of a
needle all my life—in doctors’ offices, at the mall getting
my ears pierced. When I came home and showed my mom
the small Chinese symbol under the bandage, my mom said,
“Bill, you’re not going to believe this . . .”
Two years later, in Santa Barbara, a red-headed man
named Sebastian put a small vine on my toe, and a tiny
butterfly on my best friend Annette’s toe. We were nineteen
then, and now nineteen years later, here I am again, that
buzzing sound ringing in my ears, offering up the tender
pale flesh of my forearms, a heart on one, the word yes in
my friend Lindsay’s elegant cursive on the other, navy and
careful.
The heart—blood red, perfectly simple, just exactly the
way a child would draw a heart—is about love, of course.