Chapter 6.2 (1/2)

Chapter 6.2

“Mr. Yin, there’s just one last line and we’ll be finished.”

The air already had the faint scent of blood. Only after hearing this sentence from the tattoo artist did I turn my head back again to take a look, but my eyes happened to connect right to Yin Li’s gaze.

“Were you not watching before?”

I looked down at the floor, forcing my chattering teeth to move. “I’m scared of this sort of thing.”

Yin Li signaled to the tattoo artist to stop. “Give her the tattoo gun, let her draw the final line.”

I stared at Yin Li in disbelief. “Can’t, I can’t! I don’t want to!” But the tattoo artist had already shoved the tattoo gun in my hand.

“A line has to be gone over twice. This is the second time’s final pa.s.s, so you only have to follow the line I’ve already drawn, it should be simple. Don’t use too much force.” The tattoo artist once again gave me that look full of pity.

Yin Li sat right in front of me, his beautiful back before me, and only then did I finally clearly see the design on his back left shoulder. At first like a tangled

together vine, yet also with a fierce and threatening beauty, at a closer look you’d discover that those criss-crossing lines was actually the character “yan” (颜). It was a “yan” character overlaid with pearls of blood.

With the tattoo artist’s guidance, I stiffly pulled on a pair of gloves and, trembling with fear, came to stand in front of Yin Li’s back. His skin around the twisting lines of the tattoo design looked red and swollen, and some drops of blood had escaped to flow down the line of his shoulder blade.

I felt terrified.

Obviously I was the one holding the tattoo gun, but even though I should have no reason to be scared, I was extraordinarily scared.

I knew Yin Li did this on purpose, very deliberately acting this way. Getting a tattoo really was a kind of ceremony; he was forcing me to partic.i.p.ate in it. He was telling me that the blood he bled bound us together. I inflicted pain and wounds upon him, even creating his injuries. And he, on the other hand, endured it. These pain-filled glyphs,1 mysteriously and inexorably, really would bind our fates together.

1 The author originally used “totem” instead but Niang Niang and

and I decided to change it because it’s kind of an odd way to put this sorta thing in English.