I keep expecting the raw, coppery smell of blood, but it doesn't come. Behind me, Mony's heavily tattooed arms move above my back. I have the impression of an artist moving over a canvas, before the realization strikes me, delayed. He is an artist, and I am a canvas.

He begins to draw circles.

I have high pain tolerance, but this doesn't mean that I'm oblivious to the ink being injected into my skin. The needle burns. I close my eyes. I try to retreat to my happy place, but my mind is confused by the conflicting sensations of utter Zen and uncomfortable pain. In the deepest center of my perception, the buzzing is an alien spacecraft, leaving crop circles in the golden field of my back. Wheat. Aliens?

My eyes shoot open. My images fade. I look over at Alex and Fin. They smile. I smile back.

“Are you all right?” Mony has a heavy accent — Eastern European, I guess, but I don't ask — but his speech is friendly.

“I'm fine.”

“You are doing well.”

I look down at my right hand, which is clutching a small, green, stuffed tiger. The girl behind the counter — who has fantastic red hair — gave it to me when the procedure started. “Just cause you're a first timer,” she'd explained. “Something to hold onto.”

Mony is doing lines now. I perceive the needle moving from the center, directly over my spine, the outward ends of the compass rose. The further it moves from the center, the more it hurts. He reaches the end of one line and lifts the needle. I take a deep breath before he does the next one.

“Doing all right?”

“Yes.”

Despite the fact that I'd consumed a bagel and two bananas, I feel vaguely woozy — not ready to pass out, mind you, but everything is disconcertingly soft around the edges.

I have no perception of time. It's been an hour; it's been ten minutes; it's been six days. Later, my friends who have accompanied me tell me that it was ninety minutes, give or take.

He does the dots.

I can tell because the needle is boring a hole into my skin, the rotations of his hand become smaller and smaller until I can feel myself reaching the end of a metaphorical rope. Each time I open my mouth (involuntarily; ready to release a tiny powerpuff of a noise that is not entirely unlike the sound I make during orgasm) he pulls away, and I breathe deeply.

He's shading.

I can tell because it hurts like few things have hurt before. I try to remember that time when I handed KC a Sharpie and pulled off my shirt and let her draw all over my back, and how good it felt to have her bending over me like that, the marker sliding over my skin, sketching patterns and designs and illustrations onto the furthest reaches of my torso.

This is like that. Only it hurts.

He does the letters.

North is first. I can tell because I understand this mark to be outside of all of the others he's done. It's toward the base of my neck. South is next. Then east, near my right shoulder blade.

North. South. East.

West.

West is last, and as the four lines are seared into my skin, I feel a flutter of strangeness in my stomach. My life is a book, and I'm reaching the end of a chapter.

Mony continues. He sharpens the edges of the lines, wiping away the excess ink with a damp cloth.

“Almost done,” he assures me. “You're almost done.”

When it's over, I realize that there's a fine layer of sweat over my skin. The cute girl with the red hair is looking down at me. She's smiling.

“You're tattooed!” she announces. “It looks wonderful.”

I take a hand mirror to a full length one and look at it. My nose gets slightly tingly, and when I hand the mirror back to Mony, I can barely talk.

“Thank you,” I said. “I love it. I love it so much.”

He puts a large piece of gauze over it. He taps the skin next to it gently. “Now you'll always know where you're going,” he says.

My back hurts — like a sunburn, really — but the ache is good.

I close my eyes and try to see if I feel inclined to point toward the north. My sense of direction does feel a little sharper. Maybe.

My imagination. But as I step out the front door, I sense the vaguest of magnetic tugs. My heart arching in another direction.

Less than a month until I leave.