'It's hideous. It's unnatural.' But she was lying again; the tattoo seemed to her a perilous and irresistible landscape, a terra incognita or the back of the moon.
'From time to time, he makes me take off my shirt for him and prowls round admiring me, saying "Ha, hum, what genius I had then." I think he'd like to flay me and hang me up on the wall, I think he'd really like that. He might even make me up into a ceremonial robe and wear me on special occasions. He tattooed some little girl all over with tiger stripes, once, and said she'd be the Tiger Lady. But she died, it was a failure.'
'Why did you allow him to attack you with his needles?'
'I didn't have much choice. I was only a kid.'
'I do not like it here,' she said disapprovingly. 'I do not like it at all.'
She sat up straight, formal and prim, with her hands around her knees and the furs in a shawl around her shoulders. He looked at her with something like nostalgia, as if she were an old photograph.
'Poor kid,' he said. 'And there I was, afraid of you.'
Current Music: Subterraneans - David Bowie
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