Free The Tattoo Artist by Jill Ciment Page B

tattoos. He flexed his pectorals and a shark lurched. He tensed his shoulder and a tuna jumped. He hardened his biceps and a blowfish puffed up. He tightened his other arm and a stick figure grew pregnant. He worked the muscles in his abdomen, buttocks, and thighs until all the creatures on his flesh either pounced or bolted.
    When he’d run through his menagerie, he struck another pose, hunched over and reptilian. He held it until his granddaughter finished singing. Then he opened his mouth, as wide as it would go, and slowly unfurled his tongue.
    The tip was as grooved and inked as a totem pole.
    Philip clapped to beat the band, but I winced, then looked away.
    The old man saw me wince and look away. I gave a Bronx whistle and started applauding, but it was too late. When I next caught his eye, there was a baffled, hurt cast in his gaze.
    Of course, now my own tongue is tattooed. It’s the last procedure I had done to me before Life “discovered” me. My grand finale, perhaps even my masterpiece, though what can “masterpiece” mean when the work of art is anything but immortal? Besides, don’t all old artists need to believe that their final work is their finest hour?
    A tattoo on the tongue is extremely rare and prestigious. It is customarily reserved for the very old and the very devout. It requires a herculean effort on the part of both the artist and his human subject. The tongue’s texture alone makes the work blindingly exacting, and since the organ itself is but a clump of nerves, engraving it is a form of slow torture.
    In the Ta’un’uuan language, the word “tongue” is as weighted with meaning as the word “heart” is in English. A tongue can lust, ache, break. One can be “heavy-tongued,” “hard-tongued,” or “tongue-sick.” One can even make love with “half a tongue.”
    When you examine mine, you’ll find no identifiable icons, no cargo ships, or death masks of Philip; just a galaxy of specks. Had I engraved a recognizable image on my tongue, it would have been an act of betrayal to the islanders: they believe an image on the tongue alters the truth of every word one speaks. The tongue, after all, is what shapes the song.

CHAPTER NINE
     
    he old man told us his name. It sounded, to my ears, like a measure of music played backward. When Philip tried to pronounce it, it came out as gibberish a madman might utter. The old man finally suggested we call him by his boyhood Christian name, Ishmael, and we call his granddaughter, Ishmael’s daughter’s daughter.
    Philip offered our guests another round of canned fruit, then sat down across from Ishmael and asked if he knew any master carvers who might be willing to sell us their creations. Philip might as well have asked him if he knew where we could buy yesterday’s sunset.
    Ishmael’s brows, a pair of tattooed wings, rose as if to take flight.
    Philip put it a different way. Did Ishmael know any carvers who wanted a new ax in exchange for a mask that was no longer of value?
    Ishmael turned his eyes to Philip’s display. The palm was ripe with steel and glass fruit. The art book leaned against the trunk. Ignoring the pendants and hatchets, Ishmael picked up the book, glanced at the naked mademoiselles from Avignon, then closely, painstakingly examined the reproduction of his ancestors’ skull masks. He held the page inches from his face. He grazed his finger lightly over the illusion, then quickly flipped the page over to see if he could find the masks’ back sides. An altogether different sculpture, Brancusi’s Bird in Flight, greeted him. He shook his head in wonder and bewilderment, then carefully set the book down—facedown—and began perusing our camp, trailed by his granddaughter. Whispering among themselves, they took in our waterproof tent, our air mattresses, our canvas bathtub, our coffeepot, and our stockpiles of tinned provisions, enough to feed a brigade for a month.
    “What purpose do my masks serve you?” he