Page 45 of Her Ex-Husband's Brother

We are both very focused on the middle distance for a moment.

“What about tonight?” I say. “I’ve got you here, and we’ve set up decent lighting. If I had some action shots to go with the portraits we’d have a solid first batch.” I look around the shop. “Could you—do a practice run? Fake tattooing something, just so I can get the hands?”

“I don’t fake tattoo things.”

“Could you sketch, then? Just at the station, like you’re prepping a design?”

He pulls out the stool at his station and reaches for a pad on the counter—not his beat-up sketchbook, but a fresh one, and picks up a pencil.

The shift is immediate. He goes from the slightly stiff quality he has in front of the camera to totally loose but also concentrated, his hand moving across the page with the ease of someone who has been doing this a long time.

I take approximately forty photos in the next three minutes.

This.

Thisis the content.

His hand and the pencil and the way his brow does that thing where it almost furrows but doesn’t quite. The ink on the muscles of his forearms shifts in the light as his wrist moves. I crouch for one angle and step back for another, completely in it, the hyperfocus that comes when something is working and I know it’s working?—

“What are you drawing?” I ask, without lowering the phone.

“You’re about to find out.”

I lower the phone.

He turns the pad toward me.

It’s a woman. Just her face and the top of her shoulders, pencil sketch, not finished—but even unfinished it’s obviously a Medusa.

But it’s not the monster version, with writhing serpents meant to horrify.

This one is just a woman who’s beautiful and full of righteous fury, which isn’t something I would have ever thought I’d be able to tell from just a drawing, but it’s so clear in what he’s just put to paper. The snakes in her hair aren’t monstrous. They’re powerful, like an extension of something that was always in her.

I look at it for a long time, and my throat gets a little choked up.

“You just… came up with that? Right now?”

“Sometimes the inspiration hits.”

Strength and beauty and rage, I think.All three at once, unapologetically.

“Will you tattoo it on me?”

He lowers the page. “For content? Because a tattoo is for life. Not just to meet a content quota.”

I meet his eyes. “Iwantthis tattoo.”

His hand with the pencil goes still on the pad.

“You don’t have to—” he starts.

“I know I don’t have to.”

“It’s a significant piece. It’s not—this isn’t flash, Lennon. This would be a few hours at least, and if you’ve never?—”

“You said they hurt like hell,” I say. “I know what I’m getting into.”

“Do you?” He’s looking at me now with those piercing eyes of his, and I have to adjust my gaze to the bridge of his nose, because I can’t handle the full intensity… of him. “It’s permanent.”