when it's summer in the city and you are so long gone from this city

Out of town forever, back now. 

Might take this down later. I feel weird posting pictures of my actual self now attached to such personal messy stuff. But I remember putting up a picture when I got my elk back in 2016, and valuing that I had saved that stupid turned around mirror selfie and my initial thoughts on getting the tattoo, so I'll write this now and if I feel weird later, delete it. As often as I write exclusively for myself with my dumb stories, I got out of the habit of journaling and now it feels embarrassing. But I know I wouldn't do it in any other space. 

 This has been my largest tattoo and my first color one. All of my stuff has been deliberate, but this one was particularly special. It's old and new to me. It's a sleeve; it stung more, especially the wraparound parts. My pretty artist - with her dyed rose and blonde hair and big wide green seastar eyes, who stood a full head shorter than me and who I loved even as she hurt me - called them scratches when she worked on thin skin inside of my elbow. "I'm just giving you little kitten scratches." And that's all they were.

My Io moth, a female, is first, and then I'll finish up the blooms. For the flowers, I have the chicory I wanted to tattoo onto myself when I was a teenager - my little blue lights glowing up first thing after dawn that guided me to work, school, and all the magic it was supposed to work: good luck, invisibility, the opening of locks, and relevantly, curse removal. Back then, I had read that it was a blue symbol of the Romantics, capital R, a literary movement and general sentiment that at the time that I thought was important and didn't know the littlest actual thing about. At least the yarrow - knightswounds - is native. I've grown every variety of it in my yard and it's an anticoagulant. That's not witchcraft; it'll actually stop the bleeding. 

I'll get the yarrow and the chicory blooms finished and colored in November. In truth, I've already booked the place to stay after - the same swampy little spot where the moon shown down into the lake and made a perfect creamy sky down there in the deep, a mirror of the one I looked up at. Black water, like from my nightmares. How could I stay away?

After that, I'll finish the piece for now with a little banded watersnake up my forearm. I used to see them at Elkhorn, back when I ever went to Elkhorn, which somehow I don't get to do anymore. I was trying to explain to the talented stranger who was cutting me about this when she asked about what the future snake type would be. I don't think she knew the type. I kept telling her no, they're not poisonous, they're just so mean.