Tattoo Baby

Issue 49 • Spring 2024 • Fiction

Third place winner in the Spring 2024 Contest Issue judged by Jenn Givhan

1

At first, everyone assumed it was a skin condition—so many needle-blue lines wisping over her splotchy infant body—then consensus quickly shifted to lack of oxygen. But the oxygen levels were normal. The baby was clearly breathing. On a tactile level, she wasn’t especially sensitive to the touch, nor did she lack appropriate sensitivities as the pricking, scraping, and pulling confirmed. Although dermatosis couldn’t be ruled out entirely, she was reacting normally to every skin and allergy test, as well as the ocular, aural, reflexive, and cognitive tests they tried. The lab work all came back normal—blood, saliva, urine, and fecal matter thoroughly pored through, analyzed by eye and machine. Colic seemed possible, but signs of distress could also be attributed to the circumstances: being pried away from her mother’s chest by latex hands and kept entirely out of touch and mostly out of sight from the person who gave birth to her (to say nothing of the poking, handling, piercing, probing—everything short of a stabbing—that she had to endure). It wasn’t until she was returned to the room with her mother, and she took to the breast as if she had reunited with a lost part of herself that emotions began to calm.

The panic wasn’t cast out entirely—just relegated to the corner to pace anxious switchbacks by the beaded curtain-chain—when the squiggles and lines started to take some vague shape. Nascent images and the slant of language rising in the baby’s cooling flesh.

Atina, her mom’s name, was the first decipherable element to emerge: written in script, casing the left arc of her finger-sized collar bone. In a crescent beneath the right collar bone there was an object with a curved belly and an extension off the top, reaching toward the center—like a boat with a tiller—but the image was far from clear. Under the tiller-line, not quite centered on the padded flesh that protected her heart, an oval object with the proportions of a face. But the child’s body was still so splotchy, as if the images and words had been drawn in watercolors that had bled together. There appeared to be countless other markings covering nearly every free space of skin, but nothing the medical team could make out just yet.

Even on her head, beneath the dark, wispy strands of hair, there were markings that went unnoticed when they were probing her insides and prodding her outsides. Now the hospital staff said they needed to remove her hair, but Atina refused. The baby had been taken from her long enough. If the script of her scalp was never revealed, that was just fine.

“Don’t you even dare touch my baby again,” is how she put it.

2

The interns and younger researchers were all aching to hold mother and child in the hospital, to study and discuss the phenomenon of the tattooed baby—to get extensive imaging, at least! If only they could convey to the mother how well-intentioned they were, they all thought, what a miracle this baby was, how much she could benefit the world, but there was no legal or medical cause to keep them there. The doctor with the long, silver-streaked hair said as much, eliciting a collective sigh-of-disappointment from her interns. Once the paperwork was completed, and the baby’s name, Una, was written into the record, Atina said she was going. That she’d appreciate any supplies they could provide.

A team of nurses helped to swaddle Una in the white blanket with blue and pink stripes, placing this quiet child, radiating the most novel map on her skin, into her mother’s arms. The silver-streaked doctor returned with two bags of diapers, wipes, creams, nose bulbs, formula, and other supplies. She insisted on wheeling them into the elevator and then to the exit, flanked by the majority of the maternity ward.

3

Atina was still in pain, but she could manage her own baby, buckling her into the car seat she had installed weeks before. She lowered the neckline of her baby’s onesie to her chest, casting another glance at her own name. She took a deep breath of the thick air outside before letting the onesie rise back into place, kissing her baby on the waving lines of her forehead, and sliding into the driver’s seat. She drove home in silence, pulling into their apartment complex where she saw three rail-thin rabbits racing by.

“Look at the bunnies, Una!” she exclaimed. “They must be here for you,” she added, turning around to look at the eyes of her newborn—bright brown eyes, which seemed to pop out of her scripted skin. She took the bags from the passenger seat and worked her sore body out of the car. Opening the back door, she lifted her newborn into her bag-heavy arms and walked her slowly up three flights of stairs.

“We’re here,” she said as they entered their one-bedroom apartment. There was a half-eaten melon slice reaching off a white plate on the round kitchen table, as if it were trying to escape. She managed to shift Una in her arms and let the bags slide to the floor. Sweat was sliding down her neck.

“Let’s change you before I show you around,” Atina said, carrying Una to the old, red-oak bassinet that stood between her kitchen and the living room.

Atina had changed her daughter before they left the hospital—hospital staff crowded around to gawk at Una’s body, covered in indecipherable tattoos. But now, as Atina snapped off her onesie and pulled back the tabs on her diaper, she inspected her daughter for the first time alone. The baby’s face and neck had erratic waves like the veins in an alcoholic’s nose, while the arms and legs had darker rivers that pooled near the puffy elbows and knees, but even the most imaginative would have trouble identifying a specific shape or pattern. She sat her baby up, holding her by the shoulders, and looked at her back. There was a jumble of swirls and spots that were hard to identify as individual elements, but collectively, they seemed to be hinting at some sort of design, like a milky way of planets and stars.

The face on Una’s heart, just below Atina’s scripted name, was also gaining definition. Atina couldn’t recognize an individual just yet, but there was something about the peak of the eyebrow that struck her with a flush of familiarity. On her sternum, in what had previously looked like a blob-like sea creature with various tentacles, now seemed to be taking on the dimensions and shape of a room. When Atina squinted, the appendages morphed into tubes and wires on a machine-like base, and the body found the edges of a bed with bars; Atina could recognize the cross of a window framing the side and a free-floating object that could be the rollaway bassinet—all in miniature outline. On her belly, around her swollen umbilical cord, there were three angular spears that had each broken in half, revealing what appeared to be sets of ears.

“Bunny ears,” Atina recognized, touching her finger to her daughter’s tiny stomach and tracing the bulbs beneath each set of ears and the identical puffs at the back end of each body. The bunnies—and she was certain they were bunnies now—were directed toward an angular opening that looked vaguely menacing. The collective experience amazed and exhausted her.

4

Atina had trouble sleeping that night. Even when Una had clearly drifted off, the inexplicable reality of her life kept nudging her awake. She fed and changed Una twice in the relative darkness of their apartment, but as the sun began to rise, and Atina started to feel the incoherent draw of a dream, Una let out her version of a cry: a stuttering series of noises and longer whines, as if she were speaking in code.

Atina shuffled to the bassinet. She held her baby to her bare skin and sat in the white plastic chair she had dragged from her kitchen and let her newborn feed again before putting her in the bassinet and pulling off her diaper. After she wiped Una’s bottom, noting how the skin was just as scripted and chaotic as the rest of her body, she fastened the dry diaper and saw that the wide angled mass around the sharp-eared bunnies had shrunk into shape. The opening had jagged borders, like the teeth of a mouth; the bunnies were fleeing into the open throat of some awaiting creature. A coyote, maybe. While this image had grown more defined, everything else, outside of a few distinguishable shapes and one vivid name, remained virtually the same: a maze of indecipherable markings.

The image and the absence of image—what had taken shape and what remained elusive—was unnerving. To calm herself, Atina began humming a lullaby that her mother used to sing when she was a small child. The melody, beautiful and soothing, was deeply set in Atina’s mind, but she never knew the words, having barely started speaking when her mother died. Only visceral memories remained.

Humming through the bones of her face, Atina continued to rock her newborn around their one-bedroom apartment, through the living room and the kitchen and into the small bedroom where she parted the curtains to let the light stream from the back. When she looked outside, she saw brown-red streaks stretching from the concrete into the grass, stopping at a pulpy pile of cartilage and bone.

She nearly dropped her baby who looked up with a surprised smile on her tattooed face at the unexpected dip. Atina shut the curtains in a metallic whir. She didn’t have to look closely to know. The rabbits had been devoured.

Una made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a cry.

“I’m sorry, baby Una,” Atina said, rocking her toward the bassinet, more to support her own shaking arms than a need to change her daughter. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” she added, rubbing her fingers beneath her soft chin. “Una-Luna,” she said again, soothing herself more than her baby.

“Una,” the baby cooed back, causing Atina’s eyes to widen.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s your name! Una!” she said in a rising, high-pitched voice. “My beautiful little baby! Do you like your name, baby Una?”

Then in the raspy whisper of a calm newborn, “Una,” her voice trailing and her mouth curving into a smile.

Atina gazed at her newborn in amazement when the phone startled her out of her reverie. She was grateful she had Una in the bassinet because she had pulled her hands away abruptly, as if the sound had emanated from her child and shocked her skin. The quick movements made Una’s eyes widen, but she didn’t cry.

Atina felt sweat popping in the pores of her scalp. Her phone was on the kitchen counter. Her fingers were shaking when she answered.

“Atina,” came through the receiver. It was the doctor. With the silver-streaked hair. Atina recognized the bite of her voice.

“Yes?”

The doctor asked about Una, how she was feeding, whether she was napping. She asked if Atina was interested in a home visit.

“It would just be me,” the doctor said. “I could bring more supplies. I could come today. I know how quickly the hospital goods get used up. And if you have any questions. I’m also a mother,” she said. “I know how hard the first few days can be. Not that it ever gets easy.”

“Okay,” Atina heard herself reply.

Minutes after hanging up, Atina regretted saying yes. She felt she had been manipulated somehow. Why would the doctor want to come today? Why had she allowed her to? What if she tried to take her baby? What if she saw how her tattoos were taking shape, or if Una said more than just her name, and she tried to assert some sort of right to claim her? Atina wouldn’t let it happen.

In a frantic state of sleeplessness, stress, and fear, Atina scoured her kitchen for anything that might protect her. She grabbed scissors from her counter, but they seemed flimsy. She opened a kitchen drawer and lifted the most menacing object she could find, a meat tenderizing mallet, but she couldn’t imagine what it would take to use. She didn’t have the energy to bludgeon anyone to death. Then she turned to the knife block and reached for the thickest handle, whisking out the butcher knife and holding it in her sweaty hand. It was fierce and she felt a surge in the veins of her shoulder.

She paced her apartment, consumed more by the dark fantasies in her mind than the needs of her daughter, when the apartment door buzzed, startling both Atina and Una who made a sound of either excitement or fear. Atina looked toward her kitchen and her bedroom and her bathroom before lifting the mattress of the bassinet and sliding the knife underneath. She let out a breath and buzzed the doctor in.

5

The doctor was carrying two bulging canvas tote bags, one in each hand, the blue snaking insignia of the hospital facing outward. “Hello, Atina,” she said, her voice even and soft. She waited on the threshold until Atina nodded, stepping aside to let her in.

“I brought you supplies that should last a few weeks.” She put the bags down by the bassinet, her head tilting to look at Una who angled her head in the same direction as the doctor.

When Atina approached, the doctor turned to face her. She nodded, as if sensing Atina’s fatigue. “How are you?” she asked.

“Fine,” Atina answered quickly. But the doctor had a disarming affect that Atina couldn’t combat. She released a breath she didn’t know she was holding. “A little tired.”

The doctor nodded again. She reached in one of the tote bags and pulled out a black medical case. “Would it be all right if I examined you before I looked at Una?”

“Okay,” she answered.

“Maybe you can sit down?” she said, gesturing toward the plastic chair by the bassinet.

Atina looked at her skeptically, but nodded and took a seat.

The doctor opened a blood pressure strap. The ripping sound of the Velcro was startling. Atina’s face flushed for a moment but quickly drained as the doctor strapped her arm. She pumped the band until Atina’s breath slowed and her hand started to darken. Then the doctor reached for her wrist. “May I?” she said, lifting Atina’s arm and pressing her finger to her pulse, watching the second hand on her watch.

When she let go of Atina’s arm she exhaled. “Your blood pressure. It’s very low,” she said.

“Okay,” Atina answered with a slight shrug.

“It’s important that you drink. Stay hydrated. Especially since you’re breastfeeding. And you must sleep. I know it’s hard, but when the baby sleeps, you need to sleep too.”

“She slept,” she said. “A little.” Then, in what felt like a moment of weakness, she added, “I haven’t really slept.”

The doctor nodded and looked at her watch. “I have time,” she said. “I can stay here. While you sleep.”

Atina felt her heart speed up, but looking at the doctor, at her gold-spotted gray eyes, the point of her eyebrow, and the earnest expression on her face, she relaxed. “Maybe,” she said. “Okay.”

The doctor nodded and turned toward the bassinet. A subtle smile rose on her face. Una was awake, watching the doctor who leaned in close to look at her, poring over the intricate script of her cheeks and ears, letting her fingers slide slowly through her feathery hair, as if reading her scalp. Then she snapped open her onesie, slid her out with expert ease, and lifted her up, holding her in the air and inspecting her wholly adorned body. Una smiled and the doctor seemed to beam.

“Una,” the doctor said and drew her in closely, whispering in her ear as if conveying a secret that Atina couldn’t hear before she kissed her on the cheek.

Atina felt the blood rush to her face. The events since the doctor arrived played out in her mind: the snaking bags, the squeeze of the blood pressure strap, the doctor urging her to sleep, wanting to stay before whispering secrets and affirming the message with a kiss.

The sweat popped on Atina’s skin. She stood from her seat.

“What are you doing?” Atina said, her eyes glaring at the doctor who turned with Una in her arms.

“Getting to know this beautiful miracle of a baby,” the doctor said. “And helping you,” she added as Atina moved to the opposite end of the bassinet.

“Why are you here now?” Atina said again, her voice rising.

A smile of reassurance and condescension rose on the doctor’s face as she pulled Atina’s baby in tighter to her chest. “You know why I’m here,” she said.

With her eyes on the doctor, Atina slid her hand beneath the mattress and pulled out the butcher knife.

The doctor’s eyes grew wide and she took a step back, still holding the baby, the smile fading as swiftly as it had come.

“Put her down,” Atina said, raising the knife so the sharp belly of the blade faced the doctor.

Keeping the bassinet between them, the doctor stepped forward at an angle and put Una into the bassinet before stepping back again. Atina glanced at Una who seemed to recognize the change in energy but had yet to cry. Then she faced the doctor more fully, the point of the knife angled at her chest. The doctor lifted her arms, shaking her head.

“I’m just here to help,” the doctor said again. “I only want to help,” she repeated, backing away as Atina approached. Then the doctor stopped. “Atina,” she said more sternly, her breath growing rapid. “Please. I know how hard it is to have a baby. To be alone. And the pressure of Una. A special child. I understand that. I also understand… I mean, I’d like to understand… more about you.”

Atina stopped advancing, but kept her eyes locked on the doctor.

“Una needs you to be healthy,” the doctor persisted. “To be rested,” she said. Then moving her arms very slowly inward, she took her hospital lanyard off from around her neck, her serious expression and the darker brown hair from an earlier era displayed on the face of the badge. “Take this. You can wear it while you rest, if you’d like. Or just keep it near you. I can’t leave without it. They wouldn’t let me back in the hospital,” she said, and forced out a laugh.

Still holding the knife, Atina took the badge with her opposite hand.

“I can just sit here with Una while you sleep,” the doctor said, tilting her head as she had when she first looked at her baby. Her expression was soft, almost dreamy. And Atina was so tired, the knife feeling like an unbearable weight in her hand.

“There now,” the doctor said, her voice calm, but her breath still elevated. “You can rest,” she said, as Atina let her shoulders relax, peering toward her bedroom. “I can take Una,” the doctor said, sending a jolt through Atina’s ears, causing her to clench her fist around the handle of the knife.

“Take her where?” Atina asked, embers of rage in her voice, having uncovered the secret she had been trying to keep.

“I didn’t mean take her,” the doctor tried to clarify, raising her arms out wide, making herself as open as she could, but Atina knew never to trust anyone, no matter how familiar they looked—especially those with insignias and badges.

“Please,” the doctor said, backing toward the door, her hands in front of her now.

“If Una wasn’t a ‘special child,’ like you said, you wouldn’t be here right now,” Atina said, seeing it all so clearly. “You wouldn’t want to help me. You’d have no interest in me. In either of us,” Atina said more loudly, eliciting the first sounds from Una who let out a stuttering burst that startled Atina, sending blood to her face.

She turned toward the bassinet but didn’t move from where she stood.

The cries grew louder and more desperate, shifting from a staccato series into a rising, erratic chaos of emotion that shook and heated Atina’s brain.

Atina squeezed and clenched the handle of the butcher knife as Una wailed and the doctor looked back and forth between Atina and the bassinet.

“I want to help,” the doctor finally said, pleading. “Let me help.”

As the doctor continued to speak—about hardship and support and whoknowswhatelse—it mixed with the blaring from the bassinet, growing into a jumbled storm cloud in Atina’s ears, reverberating inside her skull.

The noises were overwhelming, disorienting.

She had to make it stop.

Atina approached the bassinet, knife still in her hand. She grabbed the frame with her left hand and glanced at the soft insides of her own wrist—how easily she could make everything quiet—then saw the manifestation of all that noise in the waving lines of her daughter’s face.

She leaned down, her knife gleaming against the canvas of Una’s skin. She reached toward the roll of flesh beneath her daughter’s neck when the doctor lunged, grabbing the collar on Atina’s shirt and forcing her to turn, the butcher knife sliding into the muscle between the doctor’s rib cage, the lanyard in Atina’s opposite hand slapping the air between them.

The doctor let out a gargled cry as she fell to the floor, her eyes pleading as Atina pulled the knife out of the soft muscle beneath her breast and then drove it in again.

6

When Atina pulled the knife out for the final time, Una’s crying had stopped. Or Atina had lost the capacity to hear it. She was on her knees in a haze of heat and blood and sweat. She shuffled toward the kitchen chair. Slapped the knife onto the seat. Rose to her feet.

She leaned into the bassinet to look at Una whose bare arms were raised, her brown eyes wide. The markings on her body as vivid as they had ever been.

Atina’s name was scripted in sharper lines and the boat with the tiller had shrunk into shape. Only it wasn’t a boat. It was a butcher knife, bleeding like the one Atina had placed on the chair. And the face on her breast was indeed familiar. It was the doctor, her accusing eyebrow peaked.

Atina dropped the lanyard to the floor and felt a surge of control, her fate sealed on the skin of her child. She heard the doctor groan again—Had she been groaning this whole time?—as she pulled the onesie back onto Una, blood from her hand smearing like a snake over the cotton fabric, congealing at the bottom where she snapped the onesie closed.

Atina took the tote bags the doctor had brought and shoved her purse and the doctor’s medical kit inside. She felt the doctor’s eyes following her as she grabbed her car keys and the day pack she had taken to the hospital. She glanced around the areas of her apartment, pushing past the gurgling body on the floor, but there was nothing else she needed or wanted.

Atina let the straps of the bags fall toward her elbows. With arms pulled by the weight, she lifted Una out of the bassinet, anxious to leave her stifling apartment. To track the indelible course inscribed on the life she had created. The life that would always and never be hers.

Contest Judge Jenn Givhan on “Tattoo Baby”:
Terrifying, electrifying premise and psychological horror that sunk its tethers into me from beginning to end, in the vein of Victor LaValle’s The Changeling. Dark and unsettling–and absolutely gorgeous.

Issue 49 • Spring 2024

Fiction

Poetry

Fiction

Poetry