Seth continues applying shades of lavender to the garden fairy’s dress and explains, "The guy in The Cell — it’s not from that. Suspension is an old Shoshone practice." He goes on to describe how Native American warriors would suspend themselves from trees during a sacred ritual called the Sun Dance. The act induces trances and visions. "It sounds like a cheesy thing to say, but it was spiritual." Seth’s voice and the buzzing of the machine stop simultaneously. He sits back to inspect his work, wiping a mixture of excess pigment and blood from the fairy, then sits forward again to reapply the needles to April’s shoulder. The machine buzzes again and Seth continues, "At the beginning of the suspension I was thinking, ‘Fuck, this hurts.’ But after a few minutes your endorphins are rushing and your body relaxes.

Seth glances up at the girl. He’s tired of trying to explain to those who haven’t suspended that it isn’t a psychotic act but an intense spiritual experience.

The blonde girl’s nose remains crinkled, and Seth knows she thinks he’s crazy. He smiles broadly in spite of himself, revealing the front tooth that sits just back and to the side of where it ought. "It was a fun evening," he continues, almost egging her on. "I was only up for 15 minutes. One guy suspended horizontally for an hour."

He returns his gaze to the fairy and cleans the tattoo machine by letting it buzz in the Dixie cup of water before dipping into another color from his mini paint pot palette.

This would be the last time he would discuss his suspension with strangers. Later that night he took the pictures off the wall and placed them in a small black photo album labeled with the words that serve as a shorthand reference to the experience: December eleventh. But he keeps the album within reach on top of his pile of books that include The Tetra Encyclopedia of Koi, Gray’s Anatomy, National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Insects and Spiders, and the Feb. 2001 copy of National Geographic.

"Am I bleeding?" April asks. She doesn’t want to be forgotten.

Seth is amused. "That’s what happens when you have a needle stuck in you about a couple million times."

She starts to shake a bit from the pain and Seth stops. "Are you going to die, throw up, or pass out?"

April grits a smile, "I’m okay."

He nods, then leans in toward his work with the rounded slouch and fritzy astigmatism that comes from years of intense focus. When he is focused like this, his face takes on the same kind of blank stare that his father gave him when he first came home with his arms and legs heavily tattooed. His dad, a retired Chief Master Sergeant, abided the tour of Seth’s body art. He stood quietly "at ease" while Seth described that his left side represented heaven and his right side, hell. "Because I’m a Gemini. It’s the whole duality of man kind of thing."

When Seth had finished the gallery walk of his body, his father made only one comment. It wasn’t about the word DAD written across a bomb with Air Force wings which was tattooed on his right hand, purposely separated from the hell on his arm by a row of skulls. Instead his father pointed to Miss Fortune, a busty pin-up girl in a see-through nightie on Seth’s right thigh, and said grimly, "Don’t show that to your mother."

Seth leans in toward April’s fairy again. Another fucking fairy. It’s the kind of picture tattoo artists call ‘flash.’ It’s the crap that hangs on the walls of this and every tattoo parlor, mass-produced pictures that hundreds of people have permanently engraved onto their bodies every day. It amazes him that people don’t care that they walk down the street and see someone else with their own tattoo. But then, he is a tattoo snob.

For his own first tattoo Seth saved up nearly $70 in order to get a professional job, not the ugly messy green imprints that amateurs give in somebody’s kitchen for a six-pack of beer. But he ended up with crap anyway. He lamented not doing research on the tattooist. The image of his beloved Grendel turned out badly; the color wasn’t packed right and it looked ill-defined. Not a fitting dedication to the character detailed in Seth’s two dozen individually plastic-wrapped comic books which he stores in a tightly lidded white Rubbermaid plastic box in a place of honor: next to the television. During his free time at the shop, Seth slips one of Grendel’s adventures out of its protective sheath and sinks back into his black, high-backed cushioned chair, easily disregarding the current DVD selection and the blasting alternative music in the shop. When Seth is really absorbed, he’ll stretch his legs out and rub his feet against each other the way his dad does.

The Grendel code that Seth is enamored with is, in his mind, to honor thyself and not be a fuckup. The actual code says, "Death over weakness, death over despair, death over personal gain, death over dishonor." Seth likes to think that he’d live by these principles if he had the dedication, but figures he’s too weak of inner mind. So he takes solace in the buzzing of the tattoo machine which allows him to glide in and out of real and imagined worlds. As it was written in Grendel Tales #2, "How often have other restless spirits found solace in the blade?" Or, the machine?

TABITHA THOMPSON, a first-year graduate student in the literary nonfiction program at the University of Oregon, is a freelance writer who has frequently contributed to such publications as WHERE Phoenix/Scottsdale magazine, Today's Arizona Woman, and CityAZ.