Page 1107 - Wordsmith A Guide to College Writing

When she finishes and Eric leaves, his shoulder will be newly 3
emblazoned with three cubist horses charging toward the foreground

and one doe-eyed pony. These stand for Eric’s family. The pony is his

baby daughter, born one month ago. He chose horses because

they’re strong and beautiful and also for superstitious reasons:

Tattooing the names or real portraits of the living is bad luck.

There is something in Sarah Peacock’s Yorkshire accent and low no- 4

bullshit voice, even before you consider the proud way she carries

herself or her own impressive cloak of tattoos—the first one inked, to

her parents’ horror, in 1987, in Peterborough, England, a place and

time when girls definitely did not get tattoos. “I met a woman with a

tattoo, the first woman in my seventeen years,” she says, “and soon
as I saw that tattoo, I was like, ‘It is on.’ ” She snuck out of the house

to visit the only tattoo parlor she knew of, where she got a small tribal-

style butterfly on her left shoulder blade. It’s a tiny, faded creature

now, dwarfed and crowded over by dozens of other designs, so many

she has lost track. This doesn’t bother her. Her own multitudinous
tattoo experiences blend together in her memory, and the finished

product on her skin seems almost beside the point. Instead, she exists

entirely in the moment between the ink she has just laid down and the

ink she’s about to apply, always with a clear-eyed, placid anticipation

of what’s next. Before she even tells me it’s her job to remain a calm
and focused guiding light to clients in distress, I believe her.

Her voice has a way of sounding quiet and commanding even though 5

everything she says to me today is spoken in a half-shout over the

electric needles—her own and that of an employee a few feet away in