Ely Percy paints a picture of desire, body and art in this flash fiction
Artwork: Lauren Drinkwater
You’ve never liked ink on skin.
Not Mark Owen’s dolphin tattoo, or the watery blue tributes that girls your age acquired on a whim back when you were copycat teens; not the black Celtic arm braids or the prickly tribal designs sported by pseudo-celebs; not phone numbers or forget-me-nots scrawled lackadaisically on the backs of grubby hands.
So why do you want to be her human canvas? Why do you crave the softness of the Artist’s brush against your flesh?
You have never been the type to indelibly change anything about yourself. A fleeting hint of copper is fine to brighten up the pallor, but you struggle with the concept of applying permanent hair dye despite your fear of growing grey. Your lover knows that you will never etch her name upon your forearm or agree to any kind of everlasting Hers’n’Hers skin art – and she is not foolish enough to ever suggest it.
Yet, ironically, your fantasy is to be coloured in completely, to be covered in colourful tinted foliage. You have long imagined fuchsias and scarlet begonias down below; a giant fig leaf to preserve your modesty; and ivy that straddles your hips in delicate green twists and climbs all the way up and around your navel and north towards your tits. You will, of course, erase all traces of your pubic hair beforehand. And perhaps, if the Artist ever agrees to a follow-up session, you will disperse with the ficus lyrata and have a flagrant forest of red and gold and russet swirls instead.
“But you know I can’t do portraits,” wails the Artist, “and anyway, you never sit still!”
This second part is true: you are a kinetic thinker, someone who sees things best when their body is warm and pulsing.
She is both the beholder of beauty and the beheld, and yet often she cannot recognise what’s in the mirror.
If you were a painter then you would insist on capturing each morsel of her likeness over and over and over until it was etched in the muscle memory of your fingers. If you were a sculptor you would cast her in the most powerful and precious of metals.
If you were a painter then you would insist on capturing each morsel of her likeness over and over and over until it was etched in the muscle memory of your fingers. If you were a sculptor you would cast her in the most powerful and precious of metals.
You have waited a long time for someone like her, for someone who could see past the monochromes that you fashion for the rest of the world. There were other artists before but they clashed with you, and they lacked her elegance, her poise, her style.
You ask her again if she will paint you, and she sighs and reaches for her camera, clicks once… twice… and you are a statue again, cold, grey, two-dimensional, lacklustre.
She misinterprets this ambivalence as a preoccupation with body image, a throwback to the time when you were ill, a time when you tried to disappear from the world. And when you start to talk about definition she thinks you mean muscle and leanness and whittling every curve into a straight line; she is worried, she says, that you will get too thin.
So you begin again, and this time try to explain that all you really want is for you both to be part of a finished piece, a masterpiece. You can see it clearly, and soon she will too: you and the Artist smudged together, bodies melting like butter, free and lovely as a butterfly’s wings.
Ely Percy
Ely Percy is a Scottish fiction writer, a memoirist and an epistolarian. Their first work ‘Cracked: Recovering From Traumatic Brain Injury’ (JKP, 2002) took the form of both a creative and an academic text; they graduated with distinction from Glasgow University’s Mphil in Creative Writing in 2004, and since then their work has appeared in many reputable literary journals (e.g. The Edinburgh Review, The Scotsman Orange, New Writing Scotland, Causeway). Over the last fifteen years, Percy has facilitated countless writing workshops for various minority groups; they’ve been writer-in-residence in a prison, they’ve edited a lesbian publication, they’ve worked as a community librarian in an LGBT centre. They are currently writing a neo-queer-noir novel.
Lauren Drinkwater
Lauren Drinkwater is a woman in her twenties, surviving. Art is and always has been her outlet for everything. She’s vegan. She suffers from depression and anxiety. Wearing pink makes her feel sexy and empowered. She can’t walk in heels. If she could go back in time, she’d go to an Amy Winehouse gig. She has a tattoo of Frida Kahlo on her left arm – strong positioning for one of the strongest women in her life. She worries that people won’t accept her for her. She’s recently accepted and fallen in love with her stretchmarks. She’s spiritual. One day she’ll have an art studio, however, for now and the entire time she’s drawn, her studio’s her bed. She uses Photoshop and MS Paint and only uses fingers on the track pad – sorry illustrators and designers, she know it’s not the way you’re meant to do it. She loves alone time more than most people.
