Gerald Gets A Tattoo

Gerald, the slow rotting Easter bunny, shuffled lamely into Hot Ink, the dingiest of the six tattoo parlors on Cardinal Street. His hangover was pulsing in his fuzzy head like heavy liquid and he winced at the jangling of the brass bells hung on the inside of the door.

With one fluid motion, far more graceful than should have been allowed by a bunny in his state, Gerald ripped the bells off the door with his left paw and whipped his sunglasses off with the left.

“What’s shaking big guy?” the bald inker with the bushy mustache behind the counter asked.

Gerald threw the bells to the floor with a satisfying clamor.

“I’ve got the DT’s, everything’s shaking. I’m looking to get ‘Charlene’ put on my arm.”

The tattoo artist led him back to a chair and began shaving a patch of matted hair from the upper part of Gerald’s right arm. The electric razor jammed no less than five times on knotted hair, burrs and singe marks where cigarettes had been put out in the fur. As the needle began to relentlessly puncture his flesh, an oversweet and primal smell began to waft out. The artist grabbed one of those painter masks that cover the nose and mouth.

As he was putting the finishing touches on the simple, cursive script tattoo, the inker asked Gerald who Charlene was.

“Bitch broke my heart,” Gerald mumbled as he stood from the chair.

In the chair next to him, a young man was being prepped for a piercing. Just as the needle was about to go in, Gerald screamed, “Poser!” at the top of his lungs.

Mikey, who had gone in for a stylish eyebrow piercing wound up with a stainless steel hoop in his forehead. Incidentally, this started a short lived hairline piercing fad around Daytonville.