Poison Ink by Christopher Golden

return, but it certainly felt like it. She knew she should hold back, just bail on the whole thing right now. But she couldn’t stand the thought of hurting the girls like that.
    Letty led the way into the nameless shop, and the others followed. Sammi was the last to enter. No bells tinkled above the door, and when it closed behind her, the blacked-out windows made her feel as if they were in some bunker, far underground. Inside Dante’s shop only a few lights burned. He had an artist’s drafting table set up in one corner, and most of the light came from the bright lamp that shone down on the designs he had been working on.
    Dante picked up a bottle of lemon-flavored water that sat open on a filing cabinet and took a sip, then turned toward them, one eyebrow raised.
    “All right. We’re behind closed doors, just the six of us. Talk to me.”
    He wore a black shirt with a V-neck. The sleeves were rolled up halfway to his elbows, and for the first time, Sammi got a good look at some of the art on his skin. Entranced, she could not help staring. What little she could see of the tattoos on his chest showed her the head of a fierce lion with golden eyes and long red scars upon its face, and the tattoo on his forearms revealed twin goddesses, one grim and cruel and one lovely and pure.
    Letty had started to talk to Dante, introducing all the girls by name, but Sammi had missed much of what she said while staring at his tattoos. She wondered about him, about those blue eyes on such a man. The tattooist seemed such an exotic creature to her.
    “We don’t want to pick something out of a book,” Katsuko said, shaking her hair back and sliding her hands into her pockets.
    “It has to be something that’s just for us, that only the five of us will ever have,” Letty went on. She shrugged almost bashfully. “It’s a best friends thing, y’know?”
    Dante nodded. His smile, sort of lopsided, had a warmth and charm that gave him total command of the room.
    “I think I do,” he said. “Wish I’d had friends that mattered that much to me. I won’t even give you the usual warnings about how difficult it is to remove tattoos and how you should really think about it so that you don’t regret it later.”
    T.Q. had been quiet, as usual, from the moment they entered the shop. Now she seemed to come alive. “We haven’t thought about much of anything else all week. In fact, Caryn—”
    “Hang on,” Dante said, holding up a hand. He went to his drawing table. He seemed almost to have forgotten they were there. Pushing aside his work, he placed a fresh sheet of paper on the table in front of him and picked up a pencil.
    Sammi glanced at Caryn. T.Q. had tried to bring up her sketches, but Dante had interrupted. Someone should have said something to him, but for the moment they were all captivated by him. Sketching quickly, Dante drew a small circle—perhaps an inch in diameter—and then began to design around it. At first Sammi thought the sketch represented some stylized image of the sun, or a star, with rays of light coming off it in lines that curled to the left.
    Then Dante picked up a pen and started inking black lines over the pencil sketch. The central circle became heavy and thick, leaving only a small, round blank in the middle, like the eye of the storm.
    “It’s a hurricane, or a tornado, something like that,” she said.
    The tattooist smiled and glanced up at her, and Sammi realized they were the first words she had spoken since coming into the shop.
    “It’s meant to be many things at once,” Dante said, returning his attention to his work. “Kinda like friendship.”
    He continued inking in the little hooked fingers that extended from that central circle, marching around the circumference counterclockwise. It reminded Sammi also of Egyptian hieroglyphics they’d studied in ancient history the year before.
    Dante paused and straightened up, cocked his head, and studied the design. Apparently satisfied,