No one saw the tattoo coming.

In high school, I was not voted Most Likely To Get Inked. I was not voted Seventeenth Most Likely To Get Inked. No, I was the girl for whom they had to invent a new yearbook category: Most Likely To Attend Seminary.

At sleepovers, I squiggled under the covers at precisely 10pm because I was “on the honor code” with my parents. I lay awake on beige Wednesdays wondering if I’d hurt the substitute teacher’s feelings. I kept a spreadsheet of elderly neighbors’ birthdays. I asked my extra credit to invite its friends for dinner.

I did not ride in cars with boys, unless they were terrified or headed to MIT to study meteorology. My bra straps never showed. I said “the F word” with the frequency of a blood moon, to the pyrotechnic laughter of all. I made sure there were enough candles for every cake. I wore pink sunglasses. My cumulative alcohol consumption consisted of one terrifying shot of Eucharist I had assumed was Welch’s.

I apologized to the home ec teacher for drawing yin-yangs on the back of my hands. I apologized to my cats for neglecting them during finals week. I apologized to the radio DJ for requesting Freedy Johnston’s Bad Reputation too often. I apologized. I apologized.

I waited until marriage for intimacy. I was thirty-six. No one saw the tattoo coming.

But if they ever do a Dateline investigation, the sketch will be visible early.

On the eve of my ascension to editor-in-chief of the school paper, the faculty advisor remarked that I should “dumb down” my articles. “You’re writing Paris Review stuff. Remember that your audience is Beavis.” I quit on the spot, four years of patience bursting in an ego’s blare. I believed in my feral freshman readers. I believed in words. I believed.

Asked to kiss the ring of a visiting preacher, I suggested that resurrection was an inside job, and my witchiest quarter-Buddhist friends might be closest to heaven. The “man after God’s own heart” warned me to be on guard against my own Jezebel spirit.

Told that I talked too much about the love of God and needed to preach shredded-wheat sermons, I created an underground zine for elderly Presbyterians. The Elmers and Gertrudes sought me at coffee hour to whisper that they read every word. “You’re a dog with a bone,” a deacon snarled. “Just bread.” I could barely believe my own jazz.

Expected to pivot to a Ph.D., I got a job at a cat sanctuary. Expected to accept death’s growl, I got a tattoo.

Two beings expected it all along. The Mobius strip of my timeline was a tabby stripe. Cats had followed me merrily out of Eden. There were marmalade cats as consolation prizes for my chronic illnesses in childhood, and unbidden strays as bodyguards at the bus stop. Shelter cats kneaded my words on their own behalf. Despotic cats upholstered my dreams, waking me to whisper, “not yet.”

At the breathless end of grad school, mortarboard still airborne, I ran to the cats. Dibbles and Pippa had splattered into the shelter with death lines stamped on their files in permanent marker. They were no one’s first choice or seventeenth choice. They were not expected to be adopted. They were perfect.

Dibbles was jailed in terror behind his own stripes, a glow worm unwilling to shine under my bed. His best hiss was embarrassed and erasable, more “I am sorry” than “I am fury.” I wriggled beside him and broke the news: “I am going to love you even if you never come out. You’re mine. I’m sorry.” He came out after eight days and came into his calling as God’s sweetest clown.

Pippa was the terror of Brooklyn at four months and five pounds. White as Noah’s dove, she auditioned emotions in an auditorium of teeth. New York Animal Care & Control had labeled her “SEVERE,” her baby pictures blurry with wrath. She was Cool-Whip in my arms, all empathy and plot twist. She raged against strangers and slept on my head.

We wrote novels together, three innocents drawn into a family. When a man with a red pen gave us a new name, Pippa made him bleed.

“This can’t go on. If it came to it, would you give her up for me?”

“It won’t come to that. We will build our own little community of love here.”

“You and those flowery words! No one talks like that.”

He rubbed Dibbles’ fur against the grain, cackling at his “mohawk.”

“Please don’t do that,” I pleaded. “It can’t feel good.”

“He could get up and leave if it bothered him so much.”

“He wouldn’t.” I knew Dibbles. “He wouldn’t want to make you feel bad.”

“You’re crazy.”

I was “abnormal,” I had to understand, “not for everyone,” “so wordy!” “Dangerously innocent.” “If you got a hundred people together, they’d agree you’re naïve.”

I believed in words, so I kept preaching the love of God. I believed my audience could handle the story, so I wrote tabby rings around the four of us. I believed, with the strawberry sweet of a sleepover child, that Dibbles and Pippa would live forever. 

When my thirty-ninth winter took God’s sweetest clown and then the white dove, watercolor drained to black and white. I read my own name and knew that I was alone. Without Pippa to fill my arms, or Dibby to warm me on the couch where my husband insisted on two feet of clearance, I was bare. I dreamed of bread. I dreamed of ink.

I did not tell my husband until I’d secured my doctor’s blessing, sketched my deliverance, and made an appointment with Big Mike. The red pen was as instant as it was expected.

“You haven’t given this enough thought. I would wait a year to see if you still want it. Are you sure that design isn’t a little hokey?”

“I love it. I’m doing it.” I tuned into the jazz station.

Big Mike was all one would hope from a person thus named, dragon swagger paisleyed with childhood. Under a platinum haystack, his blue eyes reassured me, all bawdy and unedited. “You’re a first timer, but you’re a tough little gal. I always know my tough little gals. This is going to feel like birdies landing on your leg, that’s all.”

His daughter stood three feet away, sketching wolves on a rubber torso.

“She’s already better than me,” Big Mike admitted, “but that’s my legacy, that’s the future of the Lion’s Den.”

I gabbed with Mrs. Big Mike, who showed me pictures of their last vacation. “Honey, Italy is worth everything you might have to sacrifice. Get there. Tell me you’ll get there.”

I scarcely noticed that my ankle was permanently altered. “This really doesn’t hurt at all.”

“If you were a big strappin’ dude, you’d be cryin’ like one of these kittens.” Big Mike was drawing Pippa’s face now, heart-shaped and leaning into Dibbles.

“Do you get a lot of people doing pet memorials?”

“Every week. Breaks my damn heart. But –” he lifted his pen with a flourish, full maestro “—it’s good outta bad, you know? That’s my job. Good outta bad. People got reasons for this, and I send ‘em home with a memory no one can take. Call it ‘art’—” his air quotes banged into his daughter “—I don’t like to get precious about the stuff. But it’s a strength thing. You get to keep something that helps you stay strong.”

“I love that way of looking at it.”

“That’s Mike.” Mrs. Big Mike fluoresced.

“You’re gonna feel good every time you look at it.” He went back to work, Dibbles’ whiskers taking shape. “You’re gonna remember the love.”

“That’s exactly what I had in mind.”

“I’m in the happiness business.” Big Mike added feathery eyebrows. “Nobody expects that, right? But that’s what we do. Kittens or skulls, it’s happiness. And I treat everyone in this chair like family.”

“You know I’m gonna send you a Christmas card every year for the rest of my life,” I warned him.

“You’d better. Don’t forget your Big Mike.”

My mother asked if it hurt, and my husband asked if I regretted it already. I could only answer in little explosions of joy. I loved it. I loved everything about it. It was almost as permanent as the love I still believed with every one of my words.

No one saw the divorce coming, but ink unmasks pencil. I had been ferociously cherished. I would not dumb down my story. I would not take off the good girl’s rose glasses. I would not mellow the magenta of Jezebel.

I might consider a second tattoo. I might even go back to seminary. I will be the most likely to write.

*

Angela Townsend is Development Director at Tabby’s Place: a Cat Sanctuary, and she has an M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary and B.A. from Vassar College. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Amethyst Review, Braided Way, Cagibi, Fathom Magazine, and Young Ravens Literary Review, among others. Angie loves life dearly.