The dragon with the girl tattoo
The first time it stirred it was formless. Leila laid back in the chair at the tattoo parlor, the sting of the needle on her inner thigh and the scent of rubbing alcohol cutting through the haze of intoxication. The initial adrenaline rush from deciding to do something so completely out of character had given way to a sensation of calm attentiveness; something long trapped just beneath the surface of her skin leapt up to meet the needle, defining itself, and letting it play out just felt like the most natural thing to do. This was not only her first tattoo, but an intimate one at that, a stylized serpent which would curve up from her inner thigh, brush its claws tantalizingly near her mound, then wind around her hip so just a hint of its tongue would be displayed from behind. While bold, she had clarity enough to specify a design that would just barely peak over and under her favorite boy shorts. The artist’s professional focus (and, she mused, tired familiarity with the nethers of drunk coeds), had since assuaged what embarrassment made it past the booze. The handful of times she’d exposed herself publicly that week had more than doubled her lifetime total, but she doubted she’d ever make much of a habit of it. She felt an unspoken pressure to make spring break Spring Break, to play along and make the popular mistakes for the sake of making them in the narrow life window when such frivolities were considered acceptable, in the hopes the experience would eventually become a fond memory even if awkward and forced  in the moment. This, what she was doing now, was so much further than what she had considered herself capable of that she could only marvel at what early existential stirrings compelled her to it. As everything fell into place and the sirens in her mind quieted one by one, the peace allowed a warmth to start building in her core, running down her exposed hip, and circling the warm impression the artists’ gloved hand made where it rested so close to her sex.
She could still hear her friend Carly calling to her periodically from the waiting chairs, vacillating between worried and encouraging, but after a few exchanges Leila tuned her friend out more and more along with all the other noise in her mind. Leila grew more comfortable in the surroundings, and as she anticipated the intimate path the inky form would grow along her skin and how the needle might feel in each spot, she had to fight off a surprising urge to squirm.
It was the early AM of the second to last night of her sophomore year college spring break trip, after an evening of heavy drinking with her girlfriends. What had begun as a festive capstone had grown somber, imperceptibly but surely, as the looming return to the banal, stressful reality of classes sank upon their tequila-loosened hearts. About half of her circle left the bar with a group of guys they met during the week, for a night of debauchery that masked a yearning for a deeper connection than either side would admit. Leila had seen a pattern a few times in her friends over the trip, one-night stands fling that began with smiles, progressed to laughs, culminated in obnoxiously loud moans through thin resort walls, plummeted into awkward, tired lies and departures, and ended with stifled late-night sobs. Ever the observer, each stage stirred something different within Leila. She’d picked a boy toy of her own halfway through the week; cautious of the examples she’d seen, there was no sense of loss afterward, but neither did her own laughter or pleasure reach any meaningful height. A shift of the needle drew Leila out of the embarrassingly arousing memory of the lewd sounds her girlfriends had made.
The departure of half her friends from the bar earlier that evening had left four of them, and when Leila, the quiet de-facto leader of the group, decided she needed some fresh air, the other three found themselves once again pulled along in the wake of her decisiveness.
Inwardly, Leila thought of herself as anything but decisive. She was an introvert from a successful, stable family, not unloving, but with strong implicit expectations of achievement. Studies suited her well enough, she even liked a few of the teachers who unanimously adored her, and in cross country she discovered a way to check another box and get some endorphins going while remaining mostly undisturbed. Her teenage years were happy enough, if you asked her during them, but when you live under pressure you get so accustomed to it that only the occasional respite reminds you what a full breath of air feels like. She was taking such free breaths now, one after another, and they threatened to make her light-headed. Anxious memories flooded back from high school, of sleepless nights before papers, dragging herself to practice exhausted, of meeting her high-achieving peers’ families at an award ceremony senior year and being abhorred at what neurotic little copies they were of their parents, and driving home afterward, quiet, contemplating for the first time the grotesquerie of her parents’ luxury SUV. The procession of the needle made her recall the stitching of the leather, but rather than hold something eye-pleasing together, this let something shocking free. As the artist began to work on the claw, Leila remembered a much fonder high school memory: pleasuring herself with the base of her electric toothbrush in the late hours that were her own. She wondered if it would look like her serpent was holding the toothbrush if she were to do it again, and if having gone this far, she might as well post a closeup of that online just to see if it went viral. Her sex was nearly visible to a stranger right now and she was just over the line past fine with it.
College was the first prolonged respite from her parents’ well-intentioned but stifling attention and expectations. Between disentangling from a doomed long-distance high school relationship and getting psychically accustomed to the new surroundings, by the time she was ready to Gone Wild classes were in full swing and she was having trouble fitting in with the typically more extroverted, hard-partying girls that kept the “first weekend of freshman year” torch burning bright. When she did finally get close enough with Carly to go out partying with her friends, she found in the atmosphere an overstimulating but nonetheless attractive escape from her day to day anxieties. She had standards but surprised both Carly and herself with her promiscuity. They even experimented with a few threesomes near the end of fall quarter, but the won-the-jackpot smugness of whatever guy they picked and the tedious gossip that followed were major turn-offs. A fight ensued when they caught one guy trying to film it and Leila took the rest of the fall off from partying and Carly to retreat inward and refocus on her classes. To satisfy her libido, she turned to erotica and porn. From time to time she’d find herself watching a threesome and imagine watching her and Carly and a hot guy (or two or, if she were completely honest, more), not in the grainy poorly-lit quality she saw on screen before smashing that asshole’s phone, but in the loving, unrushed, high definition of the high production value stuff. It wouldn’t be long at this rate until she was wet enough for the artist to notice. The serpent’s hand reached ever more intimately toward her.