It took me the bigger part of my life, but eventually I figured out that if you don’t have much of a home, you can always make a new one yourself. That’s what Mandala Ink feels like now. Home.

It wasn’t easy. L.A.’s full of artists who can wield needles better than most surgeons, brilliant obsessives who could put a pore-perfect replica of the Sistine Chapel on your left butt cheek. I never saw the high standards of the city as a threat, though, more of a minimum requirement.

We don’t do cute little dolphins for your ankle. We reject drunk bachelor party remnants and frat dudes for whom a tattoo is just a dumb story to tell to strangers. I make sure everyone who works for me reads up on the history of tattoos, on how they were used to distinguish warriors and women from Polynesia to Northern Europe, on how it became a mode of identification for Western militaries, and how tribes in India marked themselves to be recognized in the afterlife. I tell them to treat every tattoo like it’s going on their own skin. I take tattoos seriously—and how could I not? They pretty much saved my life.

Those kinds of high standards and strong principles are a hell of an overhead. For the first few years, Mandala was a couple dimes away from going under. But I figured that that kind of heavy investment was always gonna pay off. The thing about tattoos is that they’re their own kind of advertising, especially with the internet and social media. We were putting stuff so beautiful and unique out into the world that eventually the world came to us.

Appointments started coming so thick and fast we considered hiring a full-time receptionist. People so famous we had to do their tattoos in private, or after-hours.

More than that, Mandala became as much of a community as it was a tattoo parlor. I left the brilliant art school grads with a penchant for pissing off their rich parents to the other shops, and instead the people that I hired as apprentices were dropouts, repentant ex-cons, drifters like myself. Young men and women who only needed to be given a chance, who would show you the kind of war-like loyalty only people like them can. Some of them weren’t Picassos when I first started training them, but I believed that what you were born with only determined how much work you had to put in, that you could still win the pot with the worst hand at the table, and they were only too keen to prove me right. I’ve never had an employee that some other shop hasn’t tried to poach, and I ain’t never had an employee who took their offers. A few of my very first hires have even gone off to start their own businesses in other cities by now, and I’ve given my blessing to each one of them.

Though the front of the shop is all business, out back, behind a little door, we have a private lounge. Tatty sofas and stacks of beer that don’t fit into the fridge. The smell of vinyl records and nickel-wound guitar strings. Just a chill place for the employees to hang out, I figured, except soon everyone was passing through. The back of my shop became a place for people to hang out until the bars ramped up later that night, a place to crash for kids who’d train-hopped all the way from the east coast, a secret club for people who knew what tattoos and music and good company could do for the soul. I can’t tell you how many bands were formed there, how many bad-luck stories were drowned under booze and laughter there. Part halfway-house, part art collective, part underground club. I even got a legal permit to provide alcohol, just to keep the cops off my back. Shit—what else was I gonna do with all that money anyway?

That’s where I am now, sitting back in the antique dentist’s chair we used to use for tattoos, and which is now just a strange piece of furniture I got no reason to get rid of. I have the flyer for Isabel’s gig in the one hand, my phone in the other, and I’m texting Ash to tell her where it is and what time I’ll pick her up.

It’s just me, until Ginger squeezes his big body into the doorway and slaps his stomach.

“Hoo-wee! I’m about ready for a beer, a girl, and the whole cow.”

“Did you lock up?” I ask, still looking at my phone.

“Sure did.”

Ginger’s named after the red, braided beard that hangs from his chin all the way down his chest, which makes him look like some cartoon Viking. A four-hundred pound transplant from Alabama that I got into a fight with in a jail cell once, after we’d both been arrested for attending a house party that got a little out of control. The bastard used his Southern charm to wrangle a job out of me before the night was through. That was over two years ago now.

“We gon’ start slipping if we don’t get somebody else in here helping us out. You, me, Kayla—ain’t enough. Whole damn city’s fittin’ for a tatt.” Ginger comes close, casting a big shadow over the flyer. “Hey, I’m going to that. Want me to pick you up? Save yourself the DUI?”

I pocket the phone and put the flyer to the side.

“Nah, I’ll be on my bike. I’m taking someone.”

“Oh yeah?” Ginger says, perching his big body on a stool and popping open a beer. “Double-dipping on that brunette who keeps coming by wearing those booty shorts? Goddamn that girl, I oughta sue for public indecency—damn near put a needle right through a customer last time she brought that ass through here.”

I laugh and shake my head.

“No. You remember the girl who came by yesterday morning?”

“The cute blonde with the Mona Lisa smile?”

I almost wince as he says it—calling Ash a ‘cute blonde’ is like calling a Harley JDH ‘two wheels and an engine.’

“Yeah,” I say, biting my tongue.

“Wanted to ask you about that. Weren’t she supposed to get a tattoo? Seemed like she ran outta here pretty quick.”

I shift up in the chair, lean forward to look directly at Ginger.

“Remember that night we got blind drunk back here on the gin Kayla brought? Night I put the shop logo on your stomach?” Ginger lifts his shirt to reveal the mandala around his belly button with a sense of pride. “Kayla was talking about her kid, and I said I’d only ever loved one girl.”

“That’s about all I do remember from that night.”

I shrug. “Well, that was the girl.”

Ginger sips his beer quickly and widens his eyes, interested now.

“She just came by looking for you all of a sudden?”

“Not looking for me. Just a tattoo. It was a surprise for both of us.”

Ginger laughs. “A good one—if you’re taking her out now.”

I try to sound nonchalant. “I doubt it’s gonna happen.”

“Ok,” Ginger says with a sly smile. He gets up from the stool and reaches for the whiskey on the shelf. “I’m smelling a story here. A good one.”

“Ain’t no story. Definitely not a good one,” I say, making it sound like the final word on the matter.

Ginger takes a swig and hands me the bottle, then looks at me like I’m performing a magic trick and he wants to figure out how.

Kayla steps into the back through the curtain. One side of her head shaved, the other side braided, long metal earrings that match the studs and buckles on her leather jacket and boots. She looks like she’s stepped out of an eighties rock video, and is possibly the only girl I know who doesn’t just make it work, but makes everyone else in the room feel underdressed because of it. Her tatt specialties are full color horror tattoos, which makes sense, and watercolor florals, which kinda doesn’t. But she’s amazing at both. Go figure.

“What’s happening back here, boss?” she says, as she moves to the desk and starts packing some things. “Looks like a meeting of the sad bikers’ club up in here.”

With a big grin, Ginger says, “I’ve finally found a girl Teo’s scared of.”

“Fuck you,” I say.

“Oh really?” Kayla says, turning away from her things to fold her arms and look at me with interest. “So the prolific Teo has finally met his match?”

“It’s not like that. We’ve got history. Messy, complicated, dangerous history.”

Ginger shares a look with Kayla.

“Can you hear that in his voice?” he tells her. “Sounds like fear.”

“Fuck you,” I repeat, but even I can hear the slight smile in my voice.

“What happened?” Kayla asks. “You gonna tell us? Or make us guess?”

“There ain’t much to tell. We met in high school. She was in a lot of my classes—well, art class, that was the only one I really went to. Anyway, we fell pretty hard for each other. Except we had to keep it a secret from the whole town.”

Kayla raises a pierced brow. “How come?”

“It was a small town. Everybody knew everything. I didn’t have the best reputation. Well, my dad didn’t have the best reputation, but it was the same thing to everyone else. Problem was, her family was pretty straight. Her dad was some big shot in the town. Sat on the local council, political bullshit, ‘pillar of the community.’ Mom was one of the teachers at the school until she passed from cancer our sophomore year. Last I heard, her sister was going to run for mayor.”

“Man, some people are just born into it,” Ginger says.

“Yeah,” I say, taking the whiskey back from him for another swig.

I hand it over to Kayla and she takes a swig herself, then says, “Too good for you?”

“Pretty much. Ash and her sister were like the ‘golden children.’ Destined for great things. Whole town loved them. They lived in this big white house, clean as the sky. Big gate, driveway you could drag race on, maids—the whole thing. Her mom used to donate a truckload of toys to the children’s hospital every year. They were seen as living saints.”

“Shit,” Ginger says, stretching the word out for three full seconds.

“And there I was sharing an illegal trailer with my dad on the other side of town. Dodging cops who had no one else to play authoritarian with and trying not to go out of my mind with boredom in that shitty hellhole.”

Ginger whistles and then says, “Man, just like Romeo and Juliet.”

Kayla and I laugh a little, looking at each other.

“Sure. Shitty ending and all.” I look at Ginger and notice that he’s frowning in confusion, too thoughtful to say anything. “You know how Romeo and Juliet ends, right?”

“Sure,” he says. “Those damned chick flicks are all the same. They’ve always got happy endings.”

I look at him to see if he’s serious, then shake my head in disappointment.

“Christ, Ginger. You don’t know how lucky you are that I hired you. Romeo and Juliet die in the end. They commit suicide.”

“Well shit,” Ginger says, taking a long draw of whiskey as if to dull this shocking revelation.

The moment lingers a while, the whiskey starting to hit all of us, slowing our thoughts and making us contemplate the situation.

Eventually Ginger turns to me with a confused look and says, “So what ever happened with you guys? How’d you lose her?”

I take another hit of whiskey, never drunk enough to deal with the pain of just remembering. I drop my head, stare at my leather boots, but all I see is the moon that night, the empty road, the exit sign.

“I left.”

“You left?” Ginger says after a few seconds. “You mean you just disappeared?”

I nod my head, heavy with the years of regret.

“Shit,” Ginger drawls again. “Well that’s a hell of a disappointing ending, I gotta say.”

My phone vibrates with an incoming text and I grab it from the counter beside me. It’s Ash, telling me that she’ll be ready and waiting for me to pick her up.

“Not an ending,” I say, feeling a rush of powerful determination fill my veins. “Just the end of a chapter. It’s not over yet.”