About the Book
There’s an intoxication to both ends of the needle; a tattoo goes deeper than the skin. Every tattoo Annalise collects tells a story; stories of love, loss, adventure, and a life reclaimed.
Annalise and Dylan have a complicated relationship. Obsessed with his craft, Dylan is a tattoo artist whose entire identity and sense of self-worth has been overtaken by his profession. Dylan is temperamental and volatile, and Annalise finds herself constantly in his shadow while supporting him at great cost to herself. When Dylan commits suicide, Annalise finds that she is at a crossroads. So much of her life had been consumed by Dylan; who is she without him? Guided by the bittersweet dregs of her grandmother’s memory and followed by Dylan’s ghost, Annalise sets out on a journey of self-discovery. Her body is a blank canvas, and tattoos are the art form through which she processes, negotiates, and overcomes her past. A powerful literary novel about tragedy, loss, love and the reclamation of the self in light of interpersonal trauma.
PROLOGUE
I killed my grandmother when I was sixteen. My family wouldn’t think so, but I know it was me. I put my shoes on the bed with disregard, without a care, and the next morning she was dead. She told me a hundred times to never put shoes on the bed. A warning for what was to come.
She was the first dead person I had ever seen; laying on her back with her eyes closed, I remember searching her withdrawn face for something familiar. I studied her loose cheeks, pulled down with gravity; they looked like the dull surface of sculpted clay dried in the sun. I examined her large pores, filled and smoothed with makeup, applied coldly by the mortician; makeup she never would have worn. My eyes danced across her chin, scrutinizing the surface for the small, wiry hairs I desperately wanted to see there still. The ones she asked me to pluck as her eyesight worsened. Gone. My chest felt like an old wristwatch that had been wound up; the pressure and ticking in my ears were the only real moments I could focus on in the room as the rest of my family crowded near me, touching my arms and shoulders and openly weeping and dramatizing the event. My eyes were dry, my mind, dry, and my being as empty as hers. I felt drained of blood as if my body had been cut open, the cavities emptied and replaced by wax molds of each organ to preserve the spaces for later, for when I would come back to life.