Sorry if my Latin term isn't correct, I only know a few Latin words, so I had to rely on the internet to translate the title of the made up condition.
This Document Copyright ©2014 By Laura Morrigan All Rights Reserved
~Unmarked~
Freak. Unmarked. She was used to the
insults, but the words still stung. She hated the way they looked at
her. Mothers, steering their children away from her, as if her blank
skin was catching, men, leering at her, imagining what she looked
like without her clothes, as though the blankness of her skin was
intended only for them.
She was diagnosed with the condition
when she was six, after nearly a year of endless tests. She could
still see her mother, crying inconsolably as if she were the child.
Vestibulum pelle, they called it. Blank skin. It had first
been noticed when she went for her first mark at five. She felt pride
at the stinging pain of the needle and the darkness the ink left
under her skin, but the next day, it was gone. Unlike all the other
children in her class, who wore their pink and sore tattoos with
pride.
As the years went on, and the intricate
patterns that covered her classmates' skin grew and grew, she felt
like more and more of an outcast. She wore long sleeves to hide her
arms, long pants or skirts to hide her legs. She was so excited when
a boy finally asked her out, until he took her for a ride in his car
and tried to seduce her. He said his parents always told him girls
without tattoos were easy. She hit him hard, and ran home crying.
At night, she would lie in bed looking
at books of tattooed men and women, tracing the blue lines that
covered their skin with a finger, trying to unravel the knots and
bows. She frequented the forums online, 'blank is beautiful', 'this
is our choice', but somehow, deep down, she still felt like she was
the freak everyone said she was. There was a time where she used to
purposefully knock her arms and legs on things to watch the blue
bruises bloom, and feel that at least she was, in some way, marked.
After she finished school, she tried to
get a job, but no one would take her. They would look away and
stammer apologies, say she just wasn't right for the job. She saw
their eyes continually slip to her long sleeves, knew that they knew
who she was. The freak girl. The unmarked one. People were
uncomfortable around her, no one wanted her working in their store.
Her mother had run out of the energy to care anymore, she didn't have
enough sympathy left. She clearly blamed the stress of having a freak
for a child for the divorce. Her father never even bothered to call.
One day, she met Marta. Marta was an
elite, the blue maze of lines stretching from the top of her shaved
head down to her fingertips and the very ends of her toes, where her
toenails had been stained blue. She wore tiny shift dresses to show
off her art. Everyone worshipped Marta, and she had more girlfriends
and boyfriends than anyone else. She was still at university, but she
already had a handful of job offers lined up.
'You're beautiful,' Marta told her the
day they met, taking her bare white hand in her blue one. 'You're so
unique and beautiful and you don't even know it.'
'I'm a freak,' the Unmarked said. 'No
one will employ me, as if my lack of ink marks some deficiency in my
soul. Everyone turns away from me, treats me like I am diseased. My
cousin won't even let me see her child, as if I am a bad influence.'
'People fear what they don't
understand,' Marta told her, 'you are different and people fear it.
But you are wonderful.'
Marta called her Snow, for her pure,
unmarked skin. The girl shrugged off her old name like a snake
shedding its skin and became Snow. When they lay together, tattooed
skin against unmarked, Snow felt complete.
The relationship only lasted three
years. Marta finished university, got a career, and left Snow for
another elite, and had elite children with him. For a while, Snow was
in despair, until she remembered that if Marta had found her
beautiful, surely someone else would find her beautiful one day. The
love they had once shared gave her the confidence and courage to go
on.
Snow moved to Iceland, where there was
a larger community of Unmarkeds. There, amongst the cold, with hooded
cloaks, gloves and scarves, they stood out less. But Snow didn't want
to fit in. She was studying, planning. Eventually, she would start
her own organisation, campaigning for the understanding of Unmarkeds,
and for it to be treated, not as a disease or disability, but just a
different way of being.
I once thought about a story set in a world where not only tattoos, but also extreme body modifications are a normal and/or culture appriopriate thing. Thank you for your story, it reminded me my idea (but don't worry, it wasn't even slightly resembling mine, although now I found it interesting, how people in my story, who chose not to modify themselves, would be perceived).
ReplyDeleteIf you ever wrote yours I would love to read it. :) It's ok, I figured I wouldn't be the first to have the idea but I had fun writing it.
DeleteThat's such an interesting idea and world, I'd love to read a larger piece or a comic set there.
ReplyDeleteI like it! And a nice twist at the end.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed that!
ReplyDeleteStrangely, everyone sems to have tattoos these days.
They used to make people unique, but now, sadly, they're just an everyday sight.
I remain unmarked.