Turn 95 of 233

Go to Jess for the right thigh session — the long one. Go to the bar after work and I find someone really attractive to me, a tall, fat, muscular Samoan with tribal tattoos. He is taller, fatter and more muscular than me. He stands at 6'6"

Saturday morning Lena drives to Jess's shop on Tenth Street. The right thigh. The long session. She knows what long means — the left thigh took three hours and the right is the favoring leg, the running leg, the muscle thicker and the fibers denser and the ink will have to follow every difference. She drops into the chair and extends the leg and Jess looks at the thigh the way she looked at the kneecap — reading the surface, planning the lines, the vast expanse of skin from kneecap to hip that has to carry the same tribal black as the left leg. She loads the needle and starts.

The first hour is the lower thigh — the lines branching up from the kneecap, thick tribal black curving along the quadriceps, the needle dragging through dense muscle that absorbs the pain differently than bone. It's deeper. Less sharp. More a heavy ache that builds and builds until her jaw locks and her hands grip the chair arms and the sweat runs and the grime streaks. The second hour is the middle thigh — the pattern spiraling, the lines thickening, the ink following the muscle separation the way it followed the calf and the shin. Lena's breathing goes shallow and her eyes water and she doesn't move. The third hour is the upper thigh — where the skin is softer, where the fat sits thick over the muscle, where the tattoo gun sinks into tissue that gives beneath it and the pain is a different thing entirely. Duller. Wider. The kind of pain that makes her whole leg feel like it's being slowly crushed.

Three hours. Jess wipes the last line and steps back and her hands are shaking and her eyes are red and she sits down on her own stool and breathes. The right thigh is half done — lower thigh to mid-thigh, the tribal black sharp and continuous with the kneecap below. The upper thigh is open.

"Two more sessions," Jess says. "Maybe three. The upper thigh is — it's a lot of surface."

Lena drives home and the thigh is swollen and sore and the ink is fresh and the right leg is ankle to mid-thigh now. She lies on the balcony and the concrete is warm and the night is warm and the body is three hundred and thirty-five pounds and the thigh throbs and she sleeps.

Tuesday evening Lena walks into Murph's after work. The crew is there — Walt at the bar, Marco and Frank at a booth, Daryl and Ray playing pool. She drops onto a stool beside Walt and orders a beer and the bar is the same as always — dark wood, sticky surfaces, the smell of peanuts and old beer. She's three hours out of the site and still grimy — construction dust in the creases of her skin, the tribal ink sharp on both legs, the belly sitting heavy and soft on her thighs, the belly button piercing catching the bar light. She drinks and watches the pool game and Walt talks about the Dolphins and she argues about the offensive line and the evening is easy.

Then the door opens and the bar changes. Not the sound — the weight of the air. The man who walks in is enormous. Six-six. Taller than Lena by three inches and wider by a foot and the doorframe looks small around him. He is Samoan — dark brown skin, thick tribal tattoos running down both arms and across his chest visible through an open shirt, the ink thick and black and old, the kind of tattoos that aren't decoration but identity. He is fat and muscular in the way Lena has been building toward — the offensive lineman architecture but bigger, the softness sitting on top of muscle that is massive, the belly round and heavy and the arms thick and the chest wide. He moves through the bar the way she moves through a site — with the easy confidence of a body that knows exactly what it is and exactly what it can do.

He sits at the bar two stools down and orders a beer and the stool creaks under him and Lena looks. Not a glance. She looks. The tribal tattoos on his arms are the same language as hers — different tradition, different patterns, but the same principle: ink that follows the muscle and the bone and the body's architecture. The belly is bigger than hers. The arms are thicker. The shoulders are wider. He is what she is becoming and he is further along and he is — she feels it before she names it — beautiful. The baseline horniness spikes. Not the post-run spike or the post-press spike. A different spike. The spike of seeing a body that is what your body wants to be. Three hundred and thirty-five pounds of her sitting on a bar stool and looking at a man who is bigger and fatter and more muscular and tattooed and the baseline that is always there surges up and she takes a long drink of her beer and doesn't look away.

He catches her looking. His eyes move to her — the tribal ink on both legs, the bare feet on the sticky bar floor, the belly and the piercings and the construction grime and the three hundred and thirty-five pounds of her — and he doesn't look away either. He looks the way she looked. Measuring. Reading. Seeing the architecture.