JESUS AND THE TATTOO

Teddianne sat still in the leaf rain, watching Sandy walk slowly up the hill to the back door of the house. Sandy was bigger, she looked like a woman, at fifteen. Some of the colors were in Teddianne’s hair and some brown ones stuck in Sandy’s as she walked. Teddianne was on her side, on her hip, and her dress curved under her, soft.
        She and Charles used to slide down the steep hill to the college on big cardboard pieces. Running up to the gray cement wall with the small, indented windows tha had the thick glass that you couldn’t see through. One time Teddianne left her little pocket watch in one of the windows there, and it sat there all winter long. She and Charles went and got it the next spring when they remembered, and it still worked. She thought of him and how he had a pointy face. She looked at the ground through where her fingers were spread out. A purple leaf hit an stopped near her. The little hem of her white dress was undone and stuck down in places uneven. She had a tattoo on her stomach. It was a circle, thick as a rope, and it looked like it was turning. When she sat like this, it was wrinkled in the folds of her skin. The tattoo was in the middle of her stomach. The tattoo man said, “It’ll hurt on the stomach; that’s a tender place. The needle’ll hurt.”
        “A tender place,” Teddianne said. “That’s nice.”
        It hurt, it pinched, sharp little pains rising to her head.
        She gritted her teeth. She pictured the colors squeezing out the end to become drops. She thought of Charles when it hurt the most. He had been gone a long time, almost two years. The years went out of her like cold things, pale and watery. She watched the color going onto her skin making the picture.
        The man worked his needle along the circle while Teddianne looked around the room, turning her head to see the walls, with the illustrations. It was so quiet in the room, Teddianne could hear the creaking of her neck bones. Then it was whiter inside the circle than it had been before.
        The circle went on at night; it was an infinite thing.
        She was thirteen when she got it.
        “Thirteen. That’s a great age for a girl. It’s got color to it. I don’t remember being thirteen. I was twenty before I got a tattoo. I shouldn’t give you this, you know. Your age; it’s illegal. You might change your mind later and then what?” But he liked her, and he liked the circle idea, and the colors she wanted. “Thirteen.”
        “I’m not too young, though,” she said. “I’ve seen almost everything. I’ve even seen the insides of my body—the organs in there and their colors—purples and reds, mainly. I wanted to get color put on my outside now. Inside and out, the same. Even when I’m dead, the circle will be there. Under the ground and the grass and if it snows; even if I was buried in the center of the earth, it would still be there. I wish Charles had one. I want one for him.”
        “Who’s Charles?” the tattoo man said. “Your friend?”
        “No, he’s my little brother,” Teddianne said. “He’s dead. He fell out of a tree.”
        “You’ve got bird bones,” he told her. “Your little wrists, your hands. Your neck is so pretty. Come here.” She got down and walked to him in the yellow light of the room. “You’re so little.” He kissed her on the head. She was like a light, glass thing to him. His arms were huge, printed with colors like the funny papers. He kissed the other side of her head. He was so fat he was filling the room.
    She said, “It’ll be different from everything else that ends.”
    She told the tattoo man, “This is for me and Charles and Sandy. Jesus said, ‘Men may come and go, but I go on forever.’”
        The man looked at her. He swallowed in his throat, liking her.
        He said to her, “I didn’t know He said that.”
        “He did.”
        The winds blew the red scarf cloth and the throat sounds at night.
        “She touched His garment and was made Whole.”
        Whole. Teddianne was a shut-in with a circle tattoo. She learned to listen.
        “Yeah,” Teddianne said. “The lady touched Him from behind, just on the hem of His garment, and it healed her.
        It stopped her bleeding to touch Him. I saw Him at our house. My mom was dying in bed in the living room. I told her I saw Him there with her. She believed me.”
        The tattoo man’s eyes were a deep-water blue, like parts of his hands, and he watched her.
        She pulled up her thin shirt. “I only saw part of Him, actually,” Teddianne said.
        The tattoo man said, “Now this will hurt when it cuts in. I’ll be careful with you. You tell me how it feels, and don’t tell anyone about me doing this, you understand?”
        Teddianne thought, “I’ve seen people die. In my mind. I’m not a little girl anymore. Not since a long time.”
        She said to the man, “I understand.”
        The tattoo man worked quietly in the yellow light. Her little body held her purple organs. Her chest was white with small breasts, at thirteen a symmetry to them, and their redness, with soft subtle curves outward. He touched her with his hands, into the night. And then she left, and went home with a bandage on her stomach. Her fingers felt her way into the house, to her room in the dark, to her bed, alone. She prayed in her bed that looked pale white in the dark, on her back, facing upward. She held her hands together in front of her face in the air.
        “Dear Father, help me understand. I love You, that’s all I really want to say and to feel. I feel You all the time inside, as a big clean space. Help me to know how it’s right what they do and what I do. Help me to do what You want me to do. And Daddy.”
        She was quietly aware of herself in her bed, in her house, in the land around it—the gate with the red ribbon.
        “I’m here. In Mississippi, God.”
        She felt bigger than her house, than her town, than the world—inside was much bigger than that. No size at all, then, unbounded.
        “Father, I love You so much. This feeling, the silent space of you. I want my heart to be like this all the time for everybody in a real way. Our Father Who art in heaven, show Yourself to me. God Bless the fat man tonight, and Mama and Daddy and Sandy and Charles and all the animals everywhere in the world. And Jesus.”
        She slept, her eyes moving under the lids. Sometimes she could hear the wind in the trees or the gate squeaking in back, and the stairs. Some nights Sandy came in with her, and would get in, and Teddianne would hug her around the waist.

Rudy Wilson is the author of THE RED TRUCK, SHINY, A GIRL NAMED JESUS, EXIT ANGEL, SONJA'S BLUE. He lives in Fairfield, Iowa.

A reissue of THE RED TRUCK is availible from Cash 4 Gold Books September 1, 2026 with a new introduction by Justin Taylor.