Stinkin’ Ink Tattoo Emporium on the corner of Main and Third beckoned me inside with neon lights and thumping music. At least it would be warm. I blew into my hands and watched the frost swirl away from my face. Stomping the snow off my boots, I opened the door, remembering the first time I stepped foot inside twelve years ago.
It was a day like today, only a lifetime ago. Snow piled ankle deep along the sidewalk and a brittle wind cut through the sopping-wet hoodie stuffed with newspapers that hung off my malnourished frame. Back then, my mom sat in a maximum security cell two states away. My dad rotted in a pauper’s grave somewhere outside of town. She’d finally gotten tired of his drunken beatings, and after the last time he blackened her eyes and broken another rib before he came after me, she’d had enough. Butcher knife to the heart stopped him dead in his tracks.
Since we lived in an old trailer on the wrong side of the tracks, there was no high-priced lawyer coming to her rescue with fancy legal words and an argument of self-defense. The state wanted murder one but the public defender at least bargained down to second degree and spared her the needle. Instead, she got twenty-five to life, with the possibility of parole after fifteen years.
I was eleven when it had happened. The only thing that shocked me about it was why she’d waited so long. Living in that home my whole life made me grow up long before children should. While other kids had sleepovers and birthday parties and got Christmas presents and money from the Tooth Fairy, I got to mop blood and vomit off the floor when Dad came home drunk and started punching Mom.
Between all the bruises and broken bones, Mom wasn’t able to teach me how to bake cookies or comb my hair into anything other than a messy ponytail. Instead, Mom taught me how to cover a black eye with makeup, how to hold ice on a split lip until the bleeding stopped, how to make my own food when we had any. I think she wanted to love me, she just didn’t know how.
After she went to prison, the state searched for any relatives who would take me, but they either didn’t find any or none who wanted me, so I was put in the foster system.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve heard there are some good foster families out there, but not the ones I went to. They saw me as a $500 a month paycheck. The less they spent on me, the more went into their pockets for booze and cigarettes. Generic Cheerios, sometimes with milk, and mayonnaise sandwiches don’t do much nutritionally for a growing kid, but it did quiet the hunger pangs in my belly.
Bouncing from home to home until I was fifteen, I’d finally pocketed enough from blowing old men in the park to run away. Something else Mom had taught me. At that point, I figured life on the streets couldn’t be any worse than life with the last family I was with. The mother used the money she got for me on clothes and manicures and expensive gin, while the father used me as a remedy for the mother’s headaches.
I planned my getaway on a spring night after all the snow melted and the thermometer broke fifty for the first time. I stripped the pillowcase off the crusty, stained pillow on the cot where I slept in the basement and stuffed the few belongings I had into it. Snatching a hoodie off the hook by the door, I snuck out at one in the morning after everyone was tucked in their beds snoring.
Summer wasn’t bad. At least I didn’t have to worry about freezing to death. I found a place to hide out next to the dumpsters in an alley behind an Italian restaurant. It amazed me how much food people wasted, but I was happy they did. Cold pasta and half-eaten breadsticks fueled me until the owner found me camped out there when I overslept one morning. He threatened to call the cops if I didn’t leave and promise not to come back. It was the morning of my sixteenth birthday.
I grabbed my pillowcase and the blanket I’d found dumped on the street outside an apartment building and shuffled off, crying, in search of somewhere else to ‘live.’
The first snowfall caught me off guard. The day before had been a crisp, fall afternoon, with blue skies and no hint of precipitation. Mother Nature had other ideas and dumped four inches of heavy, wet snow on the city. The cardboard box I called home collapsed under the weight, soaking me and what little I had. Cold, wet, and hungry, I stumbled down Main Street until I got to Third, lured by the grungy sound of Linkin Park blending with the whistling wind.
The shop was quiet, only one customer getting inked. One of the artists, glanced out the window and saw me standing there, shivering in the cold. She ran over and let me in.
“Jesus fucking Christ, child, what happened to you?” She brought me over to a space heater, stripped off the hoodie and wrapped a flannel blanket around me. She handed me a steaming cup of black coffee. “What’s your name?”
I swallowed the scalding liquid, feeling my insides warming. “Th-thank you. I’m Emily.”
“Hi, Emily, I’m Courtney.”
Only a couple years older than me, Courtney had an armful of tats and a face full of metal. Half her head was shaved and the hair that hung past her shoulders on the other side was fluorescent orange. She was the coolest person I’d ever seen.
“I love your hair.” I couldn’t remember the last time mine had been brushed, much less washed.
Courtney smiled. “Thanks. Hey, do you have a place to stay?”
“Umm.” I shook my head. “No.”
“Listen, I live upstairs. It’s not much, but why don’t you stay here, you know, until you get back on your feet.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Sure you can.” She bit her lip. “I don’t mean to pry, but how long have you been on the streets?”
I blew out my breath, trying to remember. I shrugged. “Since spring, I guess.”
“Come on upstairs. You can get a hot shower and I have some clothes you can borrow.” Courtney told her coworker she was taking off for the afternoon and we went through a door at the back of the shop and up two flights of stairs to her apartment.
Courtney unlocked the door and pushed it open. “Here, let me get you a towel. Bathroom is over here.” Decorated in grunge band posters, the small living room had a tiny kitchen off to one side. Courtney opened a door onto a bathroom with a sink, toilet, and stand-up shower. The other door was to her bedroom. “The couch pulls out and I’ll find you a space for your things.”
My “things” didn’t consist of much — the clothes I was wearing and a backpack I found in a dumpster stuffed with a blanket, an old thermos, and some socks (the pillow case I ran away with rotted).
“You really don’t have to do this,” I protested, but deep down I was thrilled. I always wanted a cool sister like Courtney.
“I know I don’t, but I want to. I’ve been in your shoes and someone gave me a chance to get my life back. Sometimes you have to say fuck it, and do what you can to beat the system.”
Tears pooled in my eyes. “Thank you. I’m not used to anyone doing anything for me.”
“See this?” Courtney pointed to a tattoo on her forearm that read, ‘NO REGERTS.’ “A couple years ago, I was on the streets, too. I came in here and another artist took me in. She wasn’t much older than me, but she looked it. Life had really fucked her over, but she wasn’t pissed about it. She always said she wouldn’t be who she was without the shit life hit her with. She said she had no regrets about anything and that I shouldn’t either.”
“That’s cool, but why is it misspelled?”
Courtney laughed. “She did it for me to remind myself to live with no regrets and not take everything too seriously.”
***
Courtney gave me a job at the shop answering calls, booking appointments, and cleaning up. She tried to teach me how to use the tattoo gun on oranges, but I never could get the hang of it. With her help, I got my GED. In spite of my shit sandwich of a life, Courtney showed me how to fight back.
One Tuesday morning, she took me to Human Services to file a complaint against the last family I stayed with. Now that I was eighteen, I didn’t have to worry about being thrown back into another dysfunctional home. I wasn’t the first one to complain about that family. My story gave them enough to arrest them both for all the crimes they committed against the system and the kids entrusted to them. Courtney and I celebrated that night with pizza.
I stayed with Courtney for a year and a half, until I had saved some money. She told me I was welcome to stay longer, but I needed to prove to myself that I could survive on my own. As much as I would miss Courtney, I needed to get out of this town and away from my former life.
On a crisp fall morning, I packed up my things. This time, they actually filled two suitcases and a bigger backpack I bought at Walmart. I said a tearful goodbye to Courtney and headed for the bus station and a new life.
***
Now, twelve years later, I was back at Stinkin’ Ink. The place looked pretty much the same as the first time I saw it. Clean and bright inside, the banging heavy metal didn’t drown out the constant buzz of the tattoo machine. Disinfectant permeated the air. One of the ink-covered artists threw a head nod my way. “Be with you soon.”
I knew it was a long shot that Courtney would still be there, but I hoped to see her. With her help all those years ago, I had gotten my life together, gone to school, and now worked with kids in the foster system, helping them get their life back.
A burly guy with a green Mohawk and gauges the size of my fist in his ears asked, “I’m Bull. You want some ink?”
“I was actually wondering if someone named Courtney still worked here. I met her here years ago.”
Bull blew out a breath. “Courtney was killed about a year ago. Fucking shame, too.”
“Oh my god, what happened?”
“She’d taken up this cause of saving kids on the streets because she was so fucking tired of the establishment bullshit. There was a protest, started out all peaceful, but some douchebag brought a gun and started shooting. Courtney was one of the ones who got hit.”
I sat on a stool and propped my head in my hands. When I looked up, I said, “I do want some ink.” Taking a pen and paper from my purse, I wrote what I wanted and slid it over to him.
Bull took the paper and nodded. “Come on back.”
We didn’t talk while he worked. When he finished, he held out my arm and grinned. “Is this what you wanted?”
I admired my new tattoo. NO REGERTS. “It’s perfect.”
Award winning author* Tammy Blakley lives in the Pacific Northwest. She completed her first manuscript with no formal training and a total lack of adult supervision. She has published stories in Punk Noir, Urban Pigs, Stone’s Throw, Pistol Jim Press, Literary Garage, and Mythic Picnic. Find her on Twitter @tammy_blakley and Bluesky @tammywritesbooks.bsky.social
* She won Most Improved Bowler on her office bowling team and in 6th grade she won the 4-H Biscuit Baking Competition and a 5 pound bag of flour. She still has the bowling patch but unfortunately the flour was lost in the Great Weevil Invasion of ‘74.
Urban Pigs Press 
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