The noises were the same. The buzzing of the tattoo gun as it gets ready to burn lines onto my skin. The old, squinty eyes of a biker, as he imagines the pattern before it is seared into my ready flesh. I meet his eyes with mine, I hope he shares my vision. This is going to be different. This is going to be color.

I look around the room and inhale deeply. Something is not the same. This is clinical. The chair is draped in a white bleached cotton sheet. The room is so clean, even my clothing absorbes the smell, it glides and drapes around me as I wait. I remember this smell, but I cannot yet place it. Was it an exam? Was it a hospital? Oh yes, it is the same as the hospital, a few years back. A cardiologist poked a wire to my heart for something or other. It felt cold, that wire, I felt it float all the way to my heart. I want to explain this to my tattoo artist, but he is busy preparing all the inks.

Safely, sipping my coffee now, in the chaos of my own living room, I do not have the same understanding. I cannot explain to my dreaming self, that this entire situation is off-kilter. Catawampus, my father, the carpenter, would say. I had instructed this biker tattoo artist, the one who had Willie Nelson eyes, to tattoo my ankle. We discussed it and somehow he had convinced me to tattoo the color wheel on my inner,lower calf. I agreed, as long as he would put a black and white piece on the opposite leg. A yin yang, maybe.

I asked the artist if he ever wanted to eat the ink, in the way that I sometimes find the perfect shade of gouache, and I can only think to eat it. I don’t, of course, but it is the desire to, that fuels my brush. He doesn’t understand, no one really does. The assistants come in and out offering help, which the Willie Nelson eyed man, obviously does not need.

He shaves my skin and puts the stencil on, it is three times as large as I had intended. I had showed him the size making a circle with my thumb and my middle finger. This thing was about 6 inches in diameter. My bank account was going to suffer. He started with yellow. After buzzing along a bit, he asked me if I wanted to fill in some. Of course I did! I buzzed along on my own leg, while he worked the foot pedal for me.

It became glaringly obvious that the shade of yellow he had chosen was not going to work. It didn’t match up with the rest of the colors. Couldn’t we just mix some lavender on top of it, I asked him. We would talk about it later. He began to speak of Cancer. He wondered if I understood. I did my best to let him know that I knew about it, I understood loss. He hoped I did.

We flip from one tense to another, you see in dreams tense makes no difference. Things are not what they seem. This entire dream had Johnny Cash singing Cry,Cry,Cry in the background. Only faster. I wonder what interest dreams have to the person not seeing them. I remember sleeping in the bed next to Allen, early in the morning, minutes before he would jolt awake. Dude, he would smirk at me, I had the most FUCKED up dream last night. The next half an hour he would describe to me his jet plane alien infested dream, while I wondered how he even appeared rested.