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Her heart was not in her art any more and it showed. On their flat backs, on blubbery thighs, on angled ankles, on growling biceps – on every patch of skin that served as a canvas for her patterns, the knowledge glared at her.

Her needles wouldn’t race across pliable skin any more. Her hands hesitated to trace a sharp curve and no amount of concentration would help. Business began dwindling at a steady rate and the bottle began taking on a viper’s sly appeal.

She thought of the first tattoo she had designed after meeting him. Correction, after making love with him. She had considered herself average at the art but when she added the finishing touches to her stencil, she was as amazed as the person who inspired it upon seeing it.

It was a tree. A Yggdrasill in her mind. A tree to drive evil spirits into in the minds of her ancestors and their superstitions. She was feverish with the urge to draw it. The reason behind it was simple. She wanted to mark him the way he had marked her. A man had made love to her for the first time and it filled her mind and soul with an exhilaration that matched the physicality of the manner in which she was filled.

She sat at her desk with a drawing pad stolen from her little sister’s room. And remembered. The way his torso bunched and moved under her and she sketched a trunk on the blank sheets. Twisting, curving, sharp – the way his abdominals gleamed when she looked down at him.

His legs and penis merged and formed the roots. Tough, stable, long – the feel of them bracing her own legs were, in her mind, muscular perfection. On the paper, the roots curled and dug their form deep into the crack of line she drew for the soil – her vagina.

His hands took the shape of spreading, enfolding branches. Branches that looked both like coiling snakes and comforting creepers. They had beckoned her towards him when she had entered his room a few hours back. On them, she sketched on leaves that looked like sailing ships, like brooding ravens, like open palms and pointed spears – things that brought his manner to mind.

His waving hair was the crackling glow that suffused her life-bringing tree. His face and expression, the warm, inviting stance of the tree.

She had rendered the tree intricately, every detail hinting at more than what the design revealed at first glance. A few curves would take on the shape of a woman’s body before the light transformed them into a bow or a lightening bolt. She marveled at the memory of him. A memory that the paper hugged and uncovered for the world to see.

She wanted the world to see it. Her lust in pictorial form. On the broad expanse of his back. She wanted the tree that was him and her love for him tattooed on him by her own hands.

The next day, she invited him to her parlor and showed him her stencil. He silently took off his shirt and lay down on his stomach, wanting her brand on him as much as she had wanted his on her the previous day.

She covered his entire back with the tree, every inch belonging to her heart and her art. Afterward, he would show off the tree every chance he would get, getting her more customers in the process. She lived for him, he was her very own tree of life.

And then he died.

How ironic.