on getting a tattoo / Halle Wyatt

on getting a tattoo

Halle Wyatt

you trace your palms over my bare blank skin and you ask me how i’d like to decorate my body. i think about the tattoos i might get so often that when i close my eyes i see thousands of designs on thousands of different bodies. i think about imprinting the moon on my shoulder near my clavicle, or a yellow sunflower growing on my forearm. but i’m indecisive, not because a sunflower doesn’t fit me, or the moon isn’t special enough, because ink can’t glow like the harvest moon in september, and tattooed sunflowers don’t smell like rich soil or bend toward the sun as it rotates through the late, drought-strung summer sky. i think about what matters and i can’t carry the notes of my favorite song or the sound of your deep popcorn laugh or the feeling of my cat’s fur beneath my fingertips between the moles and freckles on my stomach. i can’t tattoo the feeling of your name as it tangles around my tongue, or the deep melt of warmth that pools in my stomach as i watch you snore beside me, your long gold hair fanned out across my pillow.

you ask me where to stick and poke, and i can only show you by placing your palm over my heart. we can never be closer than this. i can never absorb you into my skin, my muscle, my bone. so hold me while you can.