Chapter Text
i.
“silent whispers of the night
paint a canvas, pure and bright”
The plight of an artist will be that her hands will never be still, only pretending at rest when in truth they will simply be waiting—to create, to trespass, to bestow—softly, to leave beauty inside pain, to leave legacy inside a stranger’s skin.
She’ll open the shop just past moonrise. The moonlight will precede her. It’ll already be caressing the curve of the floor, already waltzing within the walls, already strumming the edges of her workstation. The light won’t be warmth or fire or morning’s herald; yet moonlight will be hers, in all that it answers. Soundless and sure.
She’ll know it by heart.
She won’t speak. She won’t need to. The world speaks for her with its breathing bodies, its canvases with mouths and meanings. Her art will speak in place of language: in bruised lines, in healed skin, in the way the eyes hold what the tongue will never be able to describe.
Her hands—gloved, then bare, then gloved again—will be small mechanisms of grace. No wasted motion.
The machine will stand. She’ll uncover it. The moonlight must pour directly onto its back; only then will it stir. It drinks light the way some drink blood.
No one else will ever build one like it. No one else can.
A pulse will begin. It’s the sound of a song that no throat will ever sing. The machine will awaken; no gears will click. It’ll breathe, like her, like the ocean in its sleep. The coils will hum once, then hold.
The sign will sit. Outside, it will read: Moonlight Tattoo Shop. No flourish. No subtitle. It won't need one. Just the name that will become hers.
The Moonlight Tattooist. A cognominal sobriquet. An eponymous epithet. A nominal thing whispered by those who’ll return, again and again.
The plight of an artist will be that no one will ever know her by name; they will know only what she gives them. Their impression of her will be etched in pigment, in a pain they’ll ask for and a pain she’ll deliver, on demand.
There’s a kind of devotion in the body laid bare. There’s a meaning that lies within ink, of a story told without tongue; she’ll be the messenger, the medium, the marker.
Yet her clients will come to her asking not for absolution but adornment. They’ll lie back—vulnerable and open and exposed—asking her to etch what they won’t be able to voice, and she will, over and over; her silence will become their permission.
Time will move differently here. Not in hours or shifts, but in pieces. One piece will take two hours. Another will take five. She’ll gauge time not by sunrise or sunset but by the backs, thighs, sternums, and ribs offered to her altar. Time will not be kept—it will be given.
On the wall, the hands of the clock twitch. One hand sags down. One hand stretches up. They do not touch. They only chase, endlessly, their own estranged reflection.
She’ll wonder, again, why they’re called hands.
They do not grasp; they do not reach. She cannot feel them on her back, cannot press them to her face. They do not comfort. They only orbit, fixed at the center, doomed to circle without embrace. They move without feeling.
Why call them hands if they cannot hold? Why name the ticking of minutes a rhythm, if it never pauses to breathe?
The moon does the same, always facing, always turning, always pulling petulant tides behind it like skirts too long. The moon will change, yes, but it’ll always become itself again.
Its phases know no better: the ebb, the swell, the cycle without end.
She’ll work in cycles too. There will be no day or night in here; only empty flesh, and filled flesh, and the passage between. Between nothing and something. Between unmeaning and meaning.
She turns, the clock turns, the moon turns; altogether, all together.
The plight of an artist will be that she must know the body to know herself; she must wound, and be wounded, to ever mean anything at all. Pain makes art, and art makes pain.
And so the machine whirs, and she drinks in the moon, and the moon drinks her back.
ii.
“we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”
The sea sparkles. The sea sparkles move, and she moves to follow.
Little wayward stars in the water; not above it—beneath. They’re living things, she knows. Soft little flares of pale blue light; not flame, not fish, not quite alive in the usual sense—and they still scatter.
They flash, they bloom, they vanish. Like the tail of a dream.
She still swims after them.
Her arms are long, but not long enough. Her fingers web briefly with effort; the pulse of her reaching disrupts the calm, and as the sea sparkles, the sea sparkles drift away again, slow as smoke.
She spins, undaunted. Kicks off the rock bed. Dives through seaweed. They flash once, then vanish twice, like memories. She doesn’t know what they are, only that they shine; that they are beautiful; that they don’t want to be held.
She tries anyway.
This is the city of great waves—her childhood, her home, her dream of a home. It surrounds her, and it, too, sparkles. Coral buildings rise in spirals. Tangles of lights bob on strings between them. Kelp ribbons twist in syncopated time. Nothing here speaks in words.
Here, everything drifts. Even happiness.
She loops around a ruined pillar; the sea sparkle blinks near her again, temptingly close. She stretches; she misses. She stretches again; she misses again. It’s like the dream where she swims and swims and never surfaces.
It’s not frightening—not yet.
This is the whole of her life: the sea sparkles, and she follows. Not to catch—though she tries—but to be near; to witness the brightness up close, even if it slips away. Especially if it slips away.
She laughs, a flurry of bubbles.
She reaches; she fails. She always fails.
But she always tries.
Because something in her believes it’s worth trying—that happiness is not in the catch but in the chase.
Eventually, the chase fades. It always does. The sparkle disappears into deeper dark, or up, toward the moon-filtered surface, where only fools follow. She does not follow. She knows better.
She watches it go, heart stilled but never sorrowful.
Then she turns and swims back through the slow curve of the city. The current runs warm now, stirring her hair like drogues; and when she reaches the threshold of home, there is her mother.
A shadow first; then arms.
Her mother leans down, tilts her head forward; the child lifts her hands in return. There is no need for words. There never has.
Two taps on the wrist: you’re late.
A sweep of thumb across a forehead: I missed you.
A slow curl of hand over hand: you’re safe.
The girl nods. She presses her face into the warm hollow of her shoulder. She doesn’t want to leave. She always does.
Tomorrow, she’ll swim again. Tomorrow, the sea will sparkle. Tomorrow, the stars will run, and she’ll chase them, and they’ll flee, and she’ll try. Still.
Happiness is like a star. You chase it; it darts. You stretch for it; it climbs. You wish for it; it flees.
You shoot; it aims. For the moon.
Every day is a dream. Every night is a lullaby.
iii.
"werk des gesichts ist getan
tue nun herz-werk
an den bildern in dir, jenen gefangenen; denn du
überwältigtest sie: aber nun kennst du sie nicht"
The first thing she ever inked was a star.
Not the kind with a name, one that maps a sky or holds a wish.
It was a small one, soft at the edges; a blur of radiant curve shaped from memory, from a creature she’d never held, only glimpsed once in the slowwater shadows.
Her client had laughed—a cousin, retired from the work himself, gentle-eyed and more kind than he let on, the kind of man who offered up his back to students and said that it was good for the body to be a lesson, that it was completing the cycle, that it was good to be useful until the ink—blood—ran dry.
That’s it? he had questioned, twisting to glance at the glowing shape on his shoulder blade.
She had nodded. Just one. That was enough. For now.
She had yet to catch a star. But this—this she could hold. She could make someone else hold it, too. This was better than catching; it was keeping.
It was her first time wielding the pen without guidance, without her master’s hand over hers. The lines wavered; the ink pulsed; a glow bloomed faintly beneath her palm.
A shimmer. A presence. It looked alive.
Perhaps it was. Just a little.
Why? her master asked afterward, not unkindly. Wordless, in the way only their language allowed—taps along the coral desk, curved fingers across her wrist.
She answered in kind, her fingertips dancing slow: Because I saw it. Because I wanted to keep it. Because I lose them in the sea, but I could keep one like this.
There was no rebuke; only pause. Then another tap, gentler this time, for all the deeper it left its mark, carving the words into her bones.
You must learn to go beyond what the eye sees. Train not only your sight, but your soul.
You are not a hand. You are a channel. What you give must pass through you from them.
That is when you will start becoming a master.
He gestured to the sketches pinned along the stone wall: blades of grass that looked like swords; flowers that resembled faces; fish tattooed with storms in their bellies.
The stars outside are not enough. Look for the stars inside.
That night, she didn’t dream. She drifted. Something stirred in her chest.
The next day, she returned.
This time, she inked not a star, but stars—a curl of constellations along a forearm; bright dots threaded with near-invisible linework; a shining sky charted not with sight, but soul.
When it was done, her machine dimmed. It hummed, blinked out, then returned.
Her teacher watched.
What powered it? he asked, as it whirred back to life.
Starlight, she said.
Because moonlight is only sunlight—reflected; and yet it wasn’t lesser for being such. It held its own power. And isn’t the sun just another star, closer than most?
Starlight, too, found its way into the source and into the skin.
If only for a moment.
iv.
“we are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
how restlessly they speed and gleam and quiver,
streaking the darkness radiantly!—yet soon
night closes round, and they are lost for ever:”
The dilemma of an artist wasn't what she should make; it’s what she should abandon to make.
She wasn’t driven by hunger. Or thirst. Or praise. She was ruined, instead, by satisfaction; the moment she understood something too fully, she let it go.
She needed the pull of the unknown to keep her hands moving; needed the hint of mystery to stay sharp. What she solved, she lost. What she could name, she no longer loved.
Completion, to her, was a form of death.
She studied. She watched. She learned the language of skin like it was a second tongue; no longer just lines, but patterns; no longer just symbols, but systems—maps of the mind, cartographies of the heart. She mastered not seeing just the body, but also the soul beneath it—all the things a person meant to say but never could.
She surpassed her peers. While others practiced circles, dreaming of fame and fortune, she inked stars across her own palms just to understand how they faded. She worked like she was running out of time. Hands restless, thoughts looping without end.
She’d forget to eat, forget to drink. She didn’t rest. Only paused—for a moment—before plunging back in.
She didn’t want to be known; only to know.
Home began to blur. She stopped going back. Her cousins became silhouettes. Her mother’s hands still signed rest against her back, but fainter now; and the girl, in turn, only nodded—faintly, absently, already plotting her next design in the air.
Memory softened into myth. Family became a half-remembered warmth.
It wasn’t cruelty. It was clarity.
The dilemma of an artist is that home becomes too complete a sentence; too easily closed. A question always cuts deeper than an answer. Love given freely meant less than love glimpsed and unclaimed; she could not be stirred by affection offered in full.
She didn’t miss her family, not really. She missed the idea of it—missed having once missed them. But her chest was full now; no room. The hum of the machine filled the spaces where memory might have grown; the rhythm steadier than any heartbeat.
Her family called her gifted. Then they called her distant. Then they stopped calling her anything. Then they stopped calling her, altogether.
She answered only to her machine.
The dilemma of an artist is not that she has to choose not to love; it is that she cannot help but love least what already belongs to her. She preferred the wound to the healing; the tremble to the touch.
The question, always, over the answer.
The clock still moved, hands forever departing. And the moon above, pale and faceless, keeps pulling at something she’s long since forgotten how to give.
The dilemma of an artist is that she can’t bring herself to cease in her pursuit. And even when she rests, the sea still shifts; the tide still turns; the hands still chase what they can never hold.
v.
“아해兒孩는무서운아해兒孩와
무서워하는아해兒孩와그렇게뿐이모였소.
(다른사정事情은없는것이차라리나았소.)”
The one who escapes is the one who never escaped and the one who escapes is the one who cannot escape seeing the one who escapes and the one who escapes seeing the one who never escaped is already the one who escapes but the one who escapes has not escaped because the one who never escaped is still inside and the one who is already inside is the child and the child who is already inside is the one with no mouth but the one with no mouth opens its mouth and I become the mouth and I become the one who opens and I become the one who never escaped because the one who never escaped is the child and the child becomes the infection and the infection becomes the one who gnaws through the cord that was already severed by the one who never escaped and the one who never escaped becomes the child and the child becomes the scream and the scream becomes the one who escapes but the one who escapes has not escaped because they were already there before they escaped and if they were already there then they never arrived and if they never arrived they never left and if they never left they are still inside and if they are still inside they become the infection and the infection becomes the child and the child grows back every time I pick them off and when I pick them off I become the mites and when I become the mites I glow on the surface that never rose and the surface that never rose becomes the waves and the waves become the city and the city becomes the screams and the screams become the children and the children become a child and the child becomes me and I become the one who escapes but the one who escapes never escaped escaping so I was already there so I never left so I am still inside so I am still a child still I am still the child still.
vi.
“art thou pale for weariness
of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
wandering companionless
among the stars that have a different birth”
The legacy of an artist is not just her own; it is the weight of every legacy that ever came before, every mark traced by someone long dead, roots that snake through mind and rib and lung until breath itself feels borrowed and each heartbeat is accompanied by a call from somewhere far deeper that is not quite hers, not quite anyone’s, but everyone’s; and yet undeniably hers to carry, because she is the last, the final, the end of the line.
There is no sister or student or brother or another; no other to learn the old language of taps and traces and trails, no second pair of hands to catch what slips through hers when her hands falter unlike those of time, no apprentice to finish the stroke when her arm gives out—and so what should have been a circle, sacred and ever-returning, collapses into a line with no turn, no mirror, only distance, only drift, and she holds that unfinishedness in her mouth like a coin, like a curse, something she cannot swallow but must carry, lest the ferryman forget their faces.
What is a legacy? It’s supposed to be sowing seeds in a garden you never get to cull; she thought that, once, thought it beautiful, noble even, and maybe it is, but no one warned her how heavy the seeds could become when the garden is ash, when the soil is gone or barren or scorched beyond use, when there’s no one left to water what you’ve sown, no one to tend or name or notice, only you and the memory of fruit that bloomed in a time not yours, in someone else’s season; and so she inks buds that will never age, draws trees that will never crack, sculpts vines across skin that will not decay, even though the roots of it all—her lineage, her inheritance—wrap tighter with every movement, constricting, not anchoring but binding, and what once felt like belonging now feels like bondage.
She tells herself motion is enough, that to keep turning even when no one turns with you is still a kind of worship, a kind of rhythm, a kind of prayer, because even the moon does that, even Atlas did that—bearing the weight not because he chose to, not because it made sense, but because someone had to, because if he dropped it the whole sky would fall—and she knows she’s no god but she knows that she knows the shape of that stance, the ache of that weight, how the head learns to bow, how the arms learn to stop shaking, how the silence grows heavier than the load.
She left her family behind for this—left the known for the unknown, chose the question over the answer, the secrets of unseen depths over the warmth of voices that would have stayed, voices that called her daughter, sister, beloved—and now she wonders, late and quietly, if that was the great wound of her life, the cut that never closed, because the question remains unanswered, will always remain so, echoing through the hollow chambers of her heart like the sound of waves in an empty ark, hulled and listing: was it worth it? was it right? And she does not know.
She will never know.
Now the question stays unanswered, and so it lives on, and because it lives on it cannot die, and because it cannot die it will follow her, haunting the spaces where tenderness once lived, wrapping itself in her breath, her blood, her slow and careful work; and when she looks up, there is only the moon, cratered and cold, bright not because it burns but because it borrows, orbiting no star and orbited by none, companion to the Earth but never its kin, not truly—and yes, even with stars scattered around to share the sky, they’re too far to touch, too far to hold—and she knows something of that loneliness, of shining only for stars that will never look back.
She wonders if the moon ever weeps for lack of light it can call its own. She wonders if it grows weary of waxing and waning. She wonders if it wastes as it circles back again and again to the same place, always circling something that cannot love it back.
Even if it has the sea to mirror its own pocked, pitted face, nothing bends its own path to catch the moon; it circles the earth, yes—but the earth is not a star, only a patient anchor. It holds her, yes, but love is not the same as weight. In the end, no glow belongs to the moon itself.
And maybe the legacy of an artist is no more grand than that: a lonely orbit, a scarred satellite painting gardens it cannot enter, drawing fruit it cannot taste, knowing that even if nothing grows, the hand must still plant; even if the line will never loop back, she must still trace it forward. Because even the last of a line must move, or vanish. Because even if there is no one left to teach, she must act as if someone might still learn.
She is not an artist; she is the artist now, the only one left to carry these roots, the last gardener to recall the taste of salt amidst a garden of ash, still planting because stopping would mean admitting the soil is barren; the last to trace scars that mean something to no one else, the last to keep a question alive by never answering it.
And maybe that is the legacy of an artist: not the fruit, but the sting of sowing; not the harvest, but the ache of reaping.
She inks. She carries it all like an obol—rounded, bitter, impossible to swallow, impossible to forget—and maybe it will never be spent, never be offered, never be enough to buy passage for all the names that came before her, but still she keeps it pressed to her tongue, because memory is worth its weight in sorrow, and sorrow is still a kind of legacy. It is all she can do. To stop would mean the question dies with her. And she shall not, will not, cannot let it die.
vii.
"witch, do this for me
find me a moon
made of longing.
then cut it sliver thin,
and having cut it,
hang it high"
(entry 1)
i open up the shop. it’s so small, barely enough space,
but it’s all i could get.
it’s mine.
dry land is so strange.
the novelty is its own kind of current.
it pulls me along
(entry 2)
here they tell time differently.
they mark it by the sun, not the moon.
(it’s the same star in the end;
i suppose.)
but does the origin matter,
when it all disappears in the darkness?
still, i follow.
now, i match.
(entry 3)
so many new kinds of creatures.
each with a story in skin or feather
or scale or fur.
each texture has its own resistance under the needle—
but the challenge ends there.
wants & dreams
are all the same.
a heart is a heart is a heart.
there are no new mysteries.
perhaps i deserve constancy
(entry 4)
i start keeping lists.
a small leather booklet,
half-full already.
began as scraps,
then grew into pages.
designs grouped
by weight
not just by size.
(entry 5)
i notice draw the sea more than anything else.
not on purpose.
my hands remember even when the water’s far.
it comes easiest.
does the past have its own kind of immortality?
(entry 6)
did i ever escape?
(entry 7)
even here,
far from water,
something of it—