Free The Tattoo Artist by Jill Ciment

African masks from which the ladies’ visages had been so obviously inspired.
    Blotting up his brow with the crook of his damp arm, he sat down a few feet away from me and opened two warm beers and a tin of biscuits for breakfast.
    “I think the Picasso’s a brilliant touch. I’m not just saying that,” I said.
    He ate without taking his eyes off the dwarf palm.
    Not a soul came.
    The sun went up and down in the cloudless sky. The rollers, pounding against the distant reef, were marbled with orange phosphorescence. The only light was a flaring green disk on the vanishing horizon. After dusk, when the mosquitoes came out, I crawled back into the tent and shrouded myself in netting, but Philip just batted away the bugs and stood by the blackening sea. Finally, it became too dark to see my own hand. I couldn’t find the flashlight. I shut my eyes and tried to will myself to sleep. Sometime before I dozed off, I heard the tent flap open, felt the brush of netting as Philip crawled inside. He lay down by my side. Sweat pooled where our skin touched. “Please pray this works, Sara.”
    On the second morning, our only visitors were crabs and gulls. Just as panic began to set in, just as Philip and I finished our twentieth cigarette of the morning when we’d rationed ourselves two, an old man—sixty? seventy? one hundred?—walked into our camp trailed by a young woman in a shaggy straw skirt. Her bare breasts were so huge and projectile, they came at us like hurled footballs. The old man wore only a carapace of tattoos and an ornamented string around his waist, tied to his foreskin, pulling his penis upright.
    Philip and I were under the tent’s canopy, sorting through our provisions for breakfast.
    The old man ambled over and squatted between us. He placed his hand on Philip’s chest, then insisted that Philip do likewise. When he was sure that Philip had felt his heart beat, he gestured to the bright gold Del Monte can in Philip’s other hand. The label showed a halved peach as idyllically rendered as any vegetation engraved on the old man’s skin.
    Philip pantomimed eating from the can with his fingers, then reached for his camp knife, punctured the seal, sawed open the lid, and placed the tin in the tattooed hands.
    The old man examined the peaches drowning in the thick gold syrup. He lifted the can, sniffed it, fished out a wedge, closed his eyes (even his eyelids were tattooed) and bit into it. A moment later, he shook his head in wonder.
    “This exceptional, most exceptional,” he said.
    “It’s called a cling peach in heavy syrup,” Philip explained. “Would you like to try a different fruit?”
    “Yes, please.”
    Philip opened a can of pears and set them in front of our guest.
    Dipping his hand into the syrup (even the webbing between his fingers was tattooed), the old man plucked out a slice, tilted back his head, and lowered the milky green sliver into his mouth (even the underside of his throat was tattooed). Again, he was taken aback by delight.
    “Equally exceptional.”
    “Your English is very good,” I said.
    “I was a Christian schoolboy, sir.”
    The Ta’un’uuan pronunciation of English is impossible to replicate. Pages would be overrun with hyphens and apostrophes, yet they would no more reproduce the old man’s inflections than when my own East Side accent has been reduced to “Waddayuh wan?” The islanders hold words in their throats for as long as they can before allowing each syllable to issue forth in piping highs and crackling lows, like the last throes of a gospel hymn played on a scratchy gramophone.
    The young woman stood a few feet behind us, head lowered, breasts up, watching everything from an oblique angle. Philip motioned for her to join us, but she covered her face with her hands and wouldn’t budge.
    She mumbled something into her palms.
    The old man translated, “My daughter’s daughter very much curious: ‘What island you belong?’ ”
    “The island of