This post was submitted by Jude

The first movie Guillermo and I ever watched together was The Birds. We sat on folding chairs in his kitchen, long before it would ever be our kitchen. At the beginning, the main character (played by the epic Tippi Hedren) is in a pet shop buying lovebirds. I’d heard about these birds throughout my life, usually referring to me and a girl on the playground, but now realized I’d never actually seen what they look like. They’re multicolored, no taller than the average pigeon, and can only be sold in pairs. The shopkeeper tells Tippi what the French call them: les inséparables. And as she did, Guillermo took hold of my hand and smiled. I counted each tattoo going up his arm, and down the other, and the two I knew were inside his shirt on each shoulder. We each have exactly seven.

I was eighteen when I got the first one, and in New Orleans on a post-graduation trip I had planned with my friend Alex. We totaled her car on the way to the Harrisburg Airport when a woman in a pickup truck turned in front of us, trying to beat the light. Even before almost dying, I knew I wanted to get my tattoo once we got there. We found a place on the outskirts of the French Quarter, across from one of those above-ground cemeteries, with a massive day-glow monster hanging over the entrance. I told the man inside I wanted a green fleur-de-lis on my left wrist, which he obliged there, next to the cash register and his breakfast burrito. It took five minutes. During lunch afterward, I couldn’t stop peeling back the bandage to stare at it. I couldn’t believe I was looking at something that would be there for the rest of my life.

The last tattoo I got isn’t even finished, though it’s been over two years since Virginia first started working on it. I lost count of how many hours I spent lying naked from the waist down at her shop on the Lower East Side, holding what they called a “modesty cloth” over my dick. I never knew how painful feathers could be until I was having them tattooed onto my body, starting from the middle of my thigh and going up past my hip bone. As Virginia did all the necessary shading and coloring, her gun would hit the raw outline and I could feel its buzz all the way to my innards. And at every session, there was a different guy by my side holding my hand when I needed it. I never went back to Virginia to finish it, mostly because I had run out of money and guys whom I wanted to hold my hand.

Maybe by the time we find Suzanne Pleshette dead on her front porch, eyes gouged out by the menacing black crows circling her house, I begin to ask Guillermo about his tattoos. Most of them are animals, and look like they were ripped from the sticker book of a kindergartner. A few more would make it look as if he had passed out during a babysitting job. He was just fifteen when he got his first—a fox on his left wrist—in the same spot where I would first get tattooed, six years later in another hemisphere.

Out of all the time Guillermo and I have been together, none of it has been spent in the chair at a tattoo parlor. We talk about everything we’d still like to get, mapping the scattered spaces of bare flesh between us, and remembering the time Tippi Hedren convinced us we wanted matching lovebird tattoos. My last one is unfinished, but I’ve got a hand to hold in case I ever go back to Virginia. And I look at that hand the way I did that first tattoo in New Orleans, the same awe at such permanence—like the number zero, “one nation under God,” and all things which cannot easily be divided.

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