39.
Maricón winced a little as the needle dipped in and out of the skin on the back of her hand, but she didn’t make any noise. Queenie kept glancing up at her face as if worried she were hurting Maricón. Then she would dip the needle into Maricón’s hand again and leave another dot of ink.
The needle, a normal mundane sewing needle, was held in the barrel of a ballpoint pen, and wrapped around and around with a piece of thread that had been soaked in the ink. The ink cartridge from the pen had been cut open to get the blue ink inside, which was mixed with cigarette ash for color and saliva to keep it from drying up as the thread was dragged through it again and again until it was dripping.
The only concession toward hygiene the women made was to hold the needle under a lighter flame until it was black with soot—which darkened the ink, as well. Clara had cringed more than Maricón the first time the needle pierced the Latina’s skin.
This was going to be a cover-up tattoo. Maricón had several tattoos already, some of them done professionally but a lot of them done in this same makeshift fashion. Her prison tattoos tended to be simple, usually just a string of letters—coded gang marks that you had to know how to interpret. “ALKN” meant Almighty Latin King Nation, Maricón had told Clara, while “PV” stood for Por Vida, for life, meaning Maricón would die before leaving her gang. The one Queenie was covering up read “BO,” for Brown Only, and that was unacceptable in Guilty Jen’s mixed-race set. So Queenie had drawn a new logo over the faded letters. The new tattoo read “GJ,” for Guilty Jen, with a crude teardrop dangling from the hook of the J.
“You’re up next, Featherwood,” Maricón said, squinting a little as the needle scratched on her hand. “That Nazi bullshit on your ears.”
“Don’t remind me,” Featherwood said. She was standing guard by the door, listening for the sound of anyone moving out in the hallway. “Anyway, maybe it should be Marty who gets the next one.”
The former CO, who was crouching in one corner as if he was afraid he was about to be beaten, didn’t even look up. Clara had tried to talk to him briefly before she realized he wanted to be left alone. When she asked him if he was okay, if the set had hurt him too much, Guilty Jen’s eyes had lit up. She was just waiting for a new sign of weakness from him, something she could use to twist him deeper into her clutches.
Now she’d found an opening. “What about it, hog? You down with me, you gotta wear my name on you somewhere. How about on your forehead, would you like that? Or the palm of your right hand. You can get a lot of respect for ink on your palm, you know. It’s supposed to be the place it hurts the most.”
Marty glanced up but studiously avoided making eye contact.
“How about on his balls?” Queenie asked, and the women had a good laugh at that. “You know,” Queenie added, “if he can find them again.”
Clara thought she should try to defuse the situation. If Marty reacted, the women would hound him mercilessly—but if he didn’t react at all, they would probably hurt him just to make him react. “That’s real loyalty,” she said, louder than she’d meant to. “Getting Maricón to cover that one up.”
Guilty Jen turned very slowly to look at Clara. Then she got down from the table, moving like a cat, and came over to where Clara sat against one wall. She started to crouch down in front of Clara, then swung around to make clawing motions at Marty while stomping one foot on the floor.
The ex-CO jumped. Not much, but enough to get another laugh.
“My bitches are color-blind,” Guilty Jen told Clara. “That’s the first thing you get rid of when you join my set. It don’t help nobody, hating on people of color. That right, Featherwood?”
“That’s right, Jen,” Featherwood agreed. “You helped me see that.”