"How am I feeling? HOW am I FEELING?!" Laura seethed, taking in the sight of her tatted-up appendages. Laura had never had anything but contempt for tattoos; she considered them puerile and irresponsible and not just a little tacky. To her, they represented the monumental failure of adults to learn one of the very first rules of creative expression, ‘drawing is for PAPER’; you don’t draw on walls, or floors, or furniture, or people; that’s fucking FUNDAMENTAL!
“...Violated! Mutilated! Vandalized! That’s how I feel! Get this shit off my ARMS!”
“Relax.” Casey replied, rolling her eyes. “I think it’s a bitchin’ expression of your personality. You should keep it!”
“How do you see this as an expression of MY personality?” Laura replied, slumping her shoulders in exasperation. ”I hate tattoos...”
“I mean, look here.” Casey said, pointing at one of Laura’s smaller tattoos. “This represents your electrical engineering skills.”
“I’m an Aeronautical engineer.” Laura spat with irritation.
“Oh, right.” Casey admitted. “But you do know a bit about electronics and junk, and that tattoo represents that part of you.”
Laura looked over the miniscule tattoo suspiciously and tried to interpret the image herself. From her vantage point It looked like an upside-down pile of letters; apparently ‘V’, ‘I’ and ‘R’ arranged together in a triangle.
“Oh, yeah. I see...” Laura admitted. “That’s Ohm’s law… We covered that in physics class a few times… I enjoyed learning that stuff.”
“You see!” Casey said, beaming with satisfaction. “And these over here represent your interest in planes and space travel and your mechanical prowess and spatial reasoning skills.”
Laura looked over the tattoos Casey was referring to and recognized most of the iconography. There were depictions of materials constants, fluid dynamics, non-compressible flows and statics diagrams. She could kind of see that there was a relationship between the size of each image and the relative importance of what it depicted to her overall personality.
“Hold on a minute.” Laura said with realization. “You don’t know crap about engineering, how would you know what any of this stuff means?”
“I’m not sure.” Casey admitted, with a bit of wonder. “I mean, I don’t know specifically what any of it means, but I guess I have an innate sense of what each tattoo represents, somehow...”
“Uhuh...” Laura responded sarcastically, sounding unimpressed. “What about this one then?”
Laura pointed to a fairly large outline of a human head in side-profile surrounded by arrows pointing inward towards it.
“OH, that? That’s your introverted nature.” Casey answered with certainty.
“Fantastic.” Laura grumbled. “So my personality has been boiled down to its most basic visual representations and emblazoned on my arms… Neat trick… Now take it off! I’m not paying for laser surgery.”
“Fine, fine.” Casey replied, waving her arms dismissively. “I’m surprised you didn’t get a tattoo of a giant turd in a party hat for being such a party pooper.”
Casey placed her hand on Laura’s shoulders and concentrated on dissolving the ink, but nothing seemed to happen.
“Come on!” Laura cried impatiently.
“I’m trying, ok!? Jeez.” Casey spat back.
“Well it’s not working!”
“I can see that.”
“Well what are you trying to do, exactly?” Laura demanded.
“I’m trying to get it to disappear or dissolve or something.”
“Well, just try pulling it off, maybe.” Laura suggested with frustration. “Absorb it back into your main body of ink.”
“I’ll try.” Casey reassured her, as she shifted tactics.
While Casey hadn’t felt any kind of link to the ink on Laura's body when she was trying to erase it, she now felt a growing connection. The tattoos on Laura's shoulders began to shimmer and ripple slightly, becoming wet and flowing. The effect seemed to propagate down her upper arms to the rest of the tattoos as well.
Feeling encouraged by the visible changes in the tattoos, Casey suppressed the natural urge to push more of them farther onto Laura and instead began pulling back the ink she had deposited. At first nothing happened, as though she were meeting with resistance from Laura’s tattoos, but she continued to pull harder and more insistently until finally they seemed to slosh together as a single unit up onto her own arms.
“There!” Casey exclaimed triumphantly.
“There, nothing!” Laura shouted with agitation. “Now look at me!”
Casey moved her attention from her own arms back to Laura’s shoulders and found that they were still heavily inked, but instead of the technical iconography that had been there before, her shoulders were now covered in an assortment of Casey’s own tattoos.
“Oh, wild!” Casey exclaimed. “It’s as if your tattoos displaced some of mine and forced them back onto you… Ha... 'Displaced'… You’re such a nerd, Laura.”
“I’m such a nerd?” Laura questioned indignantly. “You said it, not me.”
“Huh? Did I?” Casey asked herself with surprise. “Whatever.”
Just then, Casey’s cat jumped up onto the table where Laura’s laptop was sitting and started lazily pacing across the keys. Casey was sensitive to the fact that Laura didn’t like cats and was quick to shoo it away before Laura completely lost her mind over the incident, but before she could act, Laura started stroking him softly as though its presence didn’t bother her in the slightest.
“Uh, Laura… What are you doing?” Casey asked cautiously.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you hate Rupert... Aren’t you mad that he’s walking all over your keyboard?”
“Mad? No! He’s not hurting anyone. You’re the only one I’m mad at around here. I wanted you to get the tattoos off of me, not floop them all around all willy frilly... Try again!”
“I don’t think it’ll work. I’m already covered in tattoos myself, I don’t have any room for more.”
“That’s YOUR problem! I never asked for this crap. I’m not your fucking canvas so get your damn ink doodles off of me already!”
“Alright, I’ll try again.” Casey relented.
She placed her hands back on Laura’s shoulders while Laura continued to pet Rupert. The ink glimmered back to life and she pulled as hard as she could while making a special effort to keep any of her own tattoos from flowing back across the link. It was hard, but with a lot of effort and concentration it was beginning to look like it was going to work. The tattoos were shrinking and compressing up her arms crowding each other tightly, but the more she pulled the icons and figures onto her own skin the more difficult it became and something odd was becoming apparent as well... Even though the number of tattoos on Laura’s arms was decreasing, the amount of ink seemed to stay the same. The remaining tattoos were actually growing bigger!
At last there was only a single remaining tattoo on Laura, but it covered her entire upper back and was plainly visible under her sleeveless top! No matter how hard Casey tried she couldn’t absorb it and eventually she had to admit defeat and let go.
“Finally!” Laura shouted happily as she looked over her naked arms. “That’s more like it. I can’t believe I was almost stuck looking like common street trash… Isn’t that right Rupert. My widdle guy, my fuzzy widdle manwy man… You sher wike typing dontcha widdle guy. You’re my widdle author. Yes you are. Yes you are!”
Laura had grabbed Rupert’s paws and began gently forcing him to tap the keys haphazardly in mock fashion.
“Uh, are you alright, Laura? You’re acting kind of strangely.”
“I’m fine.” Laura assured her. “Now that all those tattoos are off me… Thank God!.. But there are still a lot of questions about that ink of yours… Maybe Rupert could get to the bottom of it! He’s a real crack investigative reporter, right Roopie? He just loves to solve mysteries!”
Laura continued to puppet the cats arms and scrunch his face into adorable poses.
“But every good kitty cat investigator needs their own little fuzzy-boots partner!” Laura exclaimed. “I’d better see if I can adopt a few more cats! OOH. I hope they have a boy Tabby, I wanna name him Pfeffernusse!”
Laura gushed at the thought of all the cats she wanted to have to play with and started gathering her things to leave…
“Wait!” Casey shouted after her. “About the tattoos…. I didn’t, uh… I didn’t get all of them off yet, exactly.”
“What do you mean?” Laura asked, turning serious.
“Well… have a look in the mirror… Check your back.”
Laura stared at Casey sternly before slowly positioning herself in front of the hallway mirror to get a look at her back. She took a labored, trembling turn to meet the sight of a giant cat paw tattooed to her back!
“JESUS FUCK!” She screamed.