Ink

This short story is by Dewey Dabbar (the fiction pen name of Joe Gray).

Image credit: Kai Dahms, Unsplash

Before last Wednesday, I had been skeptical when anyone told me of nature giving them a sign. Now, on a bench inside a tattoo parlor on an English high street, I sit waiting as a convert.

            Across the small room from me there is a stranger. She is—like me—a lady in her late twenties. To break the silence, the young woman asks a question that is de rigueur in such a place: “What are you getting done, and why?” So I tell her my story. 

* * *

For most of my adult life, I have wanted to undergo something that the National Health Service calls female sterilization. It is a non-reversible operation in which one’s fallopian tubes are blocked. While the procedure is relatively minor in nature—it can be done under local anesthetic—the idea of it has caused my friends almost as much distress as it has my mother.

            With the exception of one short-term boyfriend, who was the frankest of communicators, nobody has been blunt enough to say what they were really thinking. But I can tell their shared worry: I will be cutting myself off from destiny; I will be reneging on my womanhood. Explaining my major motivation, which is to avoid being responsible for adding more children to the ailing planet, has only seemed to further upset people.

            “What’s your purpose in life?” the boyfriend had asked one evening in his unforgivingly sharp tone. “What could you do that was important compared with raising a family? And you should be more grateful. Not everyone can.” That was the last time he used my pillow, but his comments sunk my spirit for months.

            “You know,” my mother said around the time that I broke off that relationship. “I wanted to be sterilized too. But I wasn’t allowed, and that’s a good thing isn’t it? You wouldn’t be here to have this conversation if they’d let me go through with it.” This did little to help my mood.

            The medical androcentrism of my mother’s youth, when men felt that they could simply forbid such operations, is gone. We have transitioned to a society in which patriarchal aspirations are wielded more subtly. Each time that I have seen a male doctor to try to set the procedure in motion, he has told me that I might change my mind and that it would be wise to wait twelve months and come back then if I still felt the same way. And patriarchism is not even the full story: My luck has been no better with female practitioners.

            It is hard to question the advice of a medical professional, and I have been following the steps of this dance for six years now. But last week something changed. I received a subtle nudge from the universe, and I decided that I would no longer let myself be fobbed off.

            It happened while I was out on a walk in a local nature reserve. A new friend, who is an ecologist, had invited me out for a stroll around a meadow on the edge of our town. The keepers of the reserve were about to do their late-summer cut, so we had to go then to experience the place’s full floral glory.

            My friend had binoculars with him, and a quarter of a mile along the mown curving path he stopped to focus them on the lemon-hued wings of a resting butterfly. An excitement arose in him suddenly. “I don’t think this one’s the normal Clouded Yellow,” he exclaimed, citing a name of which I had never heard. “No, I’m sure of it. We’re looking at a rare migrant from the Continent, probably a Pale Clouded Yellow.”

            I did not share his excitement at the time, but as we continued to amble round the meadow, enjoying the sun’s pre-autumnal warmth, I was interested in what he had to say about the species. Pale Clouded Yellows are known to undertake impressive long-distance journeys. Adults born in Western or Central Europe can sometimes end up flying to Britain. Our winters are not conducive to their survival or reproduction and so these adults will inevitably expire without yielding a new generation. Yet their lives are real; they are at the heart of nature’s work. And they exhibit exquisite beauty: in their colors, in their flight, and in their very being.

            I had received my nudge. 

* * * 

I have just delivered a cut-down version of my tale to the young woman in the tattoo parlor. All the pertinent facts were included, but I altered some of the language. In place of patriarchism, for instance, I said something about “typical bloody men.”

            I show her a photo of the tattoo I want, which will be my first, and it is now my turn to ask the inevitable question of her.

            “I’m getting my new baby’s name done,” she says proudly, “with her date of birth underneath. The first one went on my left arm; the second on my right. So this one’s going to have to go here.” She taps a spot of skin beneath her ear.

            I feel like a fool. What a lecture to have given about my child-free wishes! Sensing my unease, she says: “Don’t worry. I think the operation sounds amazing. And I get why you’re doing it… Anyway, it’s your choice isn’t it?”

            Her sentiments seem genuine, and I am wiping away a tear and crossing the small room to hug her when my tattooist appears and calls my name. “Getting your whole back done, right?” he notes calmly. “We’ll be able to make a good start this afternoon.”

            With his tall frame, his bushy beard, and the rod running through his nose, he exudes masculinity. But he does not try to dissuade me, and soon the needle is bleeding yellow ink beneath my skin.