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out lilies, roses, passionfruit, and butterflies, wolves, birds. Lizzie turned them away. They were off somehow. ‘Come on, Lizzie.’ Grace pouted and tugged at her wrist. ‘If you get it on your back, you don’t even have to look at it.’
    They agreed on a lady holding a spray of flowers, her head in profile. Lizzie’s lady faced left, and Grace’s right. Grace went first, while Lizzie held her hand. Lizzie wished she’d gone first. The tattoo gun sank into Grace’s flesh. The artist had a strange smile. He gripped a cigarette in his teeth, inhaled, paused to take it out. ‘Do you think this bloke enjoys it too much?’ Grace whispered in Lizzie’s ear, and she nodded.
    â€˜It hurts now,’ the man said, ‘but you’ll come back to me. Lot of ones get hooked.’ He talked without pausing, telling them about his work, his customers. Lizzie found his accent hard to understand, felt embarrassed by the long pauses while she figured out what he said. Grace didn’t even bother. She kept her back to him and her head turned away, her face shut down against the pain. Lizzie stared at the folds of skin above his eyes, which made him seem half-asleep to her. She’d never been so close to a man from Asia before to see how they were made.
    He said that in Japan, it was against the law for working-class women to wear kimonos. ‘Hell’s a kimono?’ Grace asked, not turning around. She’d understood that well enough. He described a silk coat, long sleeves, elegant patterns of blossoms and leaves. He told them that it was a fashion for poor women to get these patterns tattooed on their bodies so they could wear a kimono forever. ‘Takes days and days. Have to rest in between, but the girl’s beautiful now. Like a princess. No one can take it off her, even if she’s locked up.’
    Lizzie liked the thought of this man tattooing the women’s bodies, and she wanted him to draw something like that on her. But by the time it was her turn, her heart was beating fast. Grace’s flesh was red. ‘I think I’m going to faint,’ she said. Then she grabbed Lizzie, who was shaking. ‘Don’t you flamin’ dare back out now.’
    The artist rested his hand on Lizzie’s side, and it tickled. She laughed at his hands on her skin and at the thought that this old Japanese man was the first to put his hands on her adult back, so sensitive from all the times she’d imagined being touched.
    â€˜Don’t move,’ he said, the gun digging into her skin.
    Grace sat in the corner, pale, her back pulled away from the frame of the chair.
    The man clicked his tongue, muttered something in his language. Lizzie squeezed her eyes shut.
    When it was done, Lizzie and Grace stood outside the tattoo parlour, light-headed from the pain, Lizzie suddenly aware of the street sounds around her, the omnibus, windows rattling in their frames, a man calling out to someone she couldn’t see. She gathered herself together, trying to make the best of it. ‘Bloody hurts. But gives you a thrill, doesn’t it?’
    Grace teetered on the sidewalk. ‘Once I fell over on my back. Helping Mum hang up the washing, and I slipped and fell. Thought I’d broken my back. Worse pain than this. Different. Couldn’t move. Dad had to carry me. I lay in bed for two days and just kept telling myself, “It can’t be broken. It can’t.” And then it got better.’
    â€˜So I can talk myself out of this?’
    â€˜Maybe. If you say it right.’
    Later, Lizzie looked at the painted woman closely in the bathroom mirror. The ink was black, skin raised and red all around. When Lizzie stretched the flesh, the woman’s face was wrong somehow, too timid, mouth turned down, when it should have been fierce. The tattoo didn’t make her braver; all it did was throb.
    Grace’s mother saw hers within two days and