The Tattoo My Daughter Hid From Us

She peeled the tape off slow. She had to work at it because the gauze had stuck a little, and she winced, and I almost went to help her and I made myself stand still because I understood all at once that this was between the two of them and I was not supposed to be in it. She got the tape loose. She lifted the gauze away from her skin.

And she laid her forearm down flat on the table under the kitchen light so her father could see it.

It was a tattoo. Of course it was a tattoo. I think Glen and I had both known it was a tattoo for ten minutes and had each been building our own argument about it, mine quiet and his not. Sixteen years old and she had gone and gotten herself tattooed, probably talked that Rath girl into driving her to the shop over in Pratt, and there it was on her arm forever, and I had my mouth open to say something about forever.

Then I read it.

It was words. It was a line of handwriting, small, on the inside of her forearm where you would turn your wrist up to look at it. It was not a font. It was not any of the swirly script the girls get. It was crooked and blocky and leaned a little to the right, and it was pressed-down heavy the way a man writes who learned on a pencil and never trusted a pen, and it said:

steady on, Bug

And under the words, no bigger than a thumbnail, was a little bird. A meadowlark, drawn in that same heavy line, mid-whistle, the way you would doodle one in the corner of a feed-store calendar.

I heard the sound Glen made before I understood why he made it.

It was not a word. It came up out of him from somewhere below his chest, a kind of broken-off breath, and his hand came down flat on the table next to her arm, not to grab it, just to hold himself up. He was staring at the inside of her forearm the way you stare at somebody you have not seen in a long time coming across a room.

“That’s,” he said. And he couldn’t finish it.

Because it was Pop’s hand. It was Dale Mercer’s handwriting, the exact heavy crooked lean of it, the hand that had written on the back of every photograph in the house and tagged every fence post and left notes on our kitchen table in pencil for forty years, the hand that signed “steady on, Bug” at the bottom of every birthday card he ever gave that girl since she was small enough to carry. Steady on. It was what he said instead of goodbye. Phone calls, driveways, the end of every supper. He would put two fingers up and say steady on, Bug, and off he’d go. I had heard it a thousand times and I had stopped hearing it, the way you stop hearing the furnace, and now it was pressed into my daughter’s skin in his own handwriting and my husband was coming apart at the kitchen table over a bowl of chili going cold.