The Mark of a Sinner

This Is The Whole Damn Thing. Enjoy

The buzzing gets louder as the needle approaches my skin.

            The tattoo artist looks at me doubtfully. "You sure you want to do this, kid?"

            "I'm paying you enough for you not to ask questions. Just do it," I bark.

The buzzing of the needle crescendos as it pierces my back and pain lances up my nerves. I breathe a sigh of relief. It will be hidden now. No one will have to know that I killed a man.

***

            In my world, tattoos are not just physically permanent. They mark you with the stain of a criminal, and the rest of the world will forever associate you with sin. Most would never even dream of getting a tattoo, save those in gangs; people with tattoos are hiding something wretched.

Marks mean sins. For every mortal sin committed, a dark slash appears somewhere on your body. The only exception is murder, for which you are marked with a rose wherever you delivered the killing blow to the victim. Most people have one or two dark slashes, but they don't particularly care about concealing them—everybody makes mistakes, after all. The people in my world have angry cyclones of dark slashes up and down their arms. Some have veritable bouquets of roses.

            None of them are good men.

            I wouldn't even be here, a needle permanently marking me, if my lousy excuse of a father hadn't pissed off to some dark, whiskey-filled hole and left me the responsibility of caring for my mother and little brother. They deserved the best, but for a street rat in Chicago, the best is hard to come by unless you are willing to sell your soul. Mom works three jobs and can barely keep a roof over our heads. Elijah is seven, and cannot do much about our situation. I'm eighteen, which makes our situation just as much my problem as Mom's. I used to work at the Dairy Queen four blocks down, and that brought in a little, but not nearly enough.

We were one missed month of rent away from eviction when I met Sammy. I was walking home one night from work when the thirty-something brute with sleeves of tattoos jumped me. He didn't expect me to fight back, and he certainly didn't expect me to take down a man twice my size. Now, I shrug off my victory in the scuffle as nothing, but then, for me, it was life and death. My mother could not afford for something to happen to me, and the potent swill of desperation awarded me the win and my subsequent initiation into the Sinnermen gang.

Sammy had brought me to Kline, his pitbull of a boss with roses crawling up his deceptively delicate neck on wickedly thorny vines. Kline had offered me a spot in the Sinnermen, which came with vast monetary coffers and security for myself and my family. All I had to do was kill a man.

So I did. I stabbed Tim McElroy in the back with a knife. The only thing Kline told me about him was that he needed to die and he was my assignment. I didn't ask questions. I just killed him.

The rose that bloomed into existence on my back when the life left Tim's body screamed with pain as I was marked permanently with the stranger's death. I never expected it to hurt this much to murder someone, but then I suppose that's the point of the mark—beyond being everlastingly ostracized from civil society, to dissuade you from committing a sin.

As if I wasn't bitter enough towards the world that placed my hard-working family in the dregs of society, I became even more hardened against it with my taking of a life. Not much hurts or shocks me anymore, and I don't really have friends—the allies I have in the gang can't be considered friends. It's for the best, though. I can only imagine what sin the gang will have me commit next, or what nasty thing one of my peers in the gang will do to one-up me. It's probably better that I'm prepared.