As winter deepens, my mother's tattoos become more expansive: a black and pink Florida sunset covers almost all of her upper right arm; a fleet of sailboats, masts raised, skims across her left thigh; on her right breast, a portrait of the dark, lapping ocean, the shadowy outline of a gull with wings stretched gliding over the blue expanse of her chest. Sometimes it will be weeks before Paula and I notice a new tattoo, and then only by accident, catching a glimpse of her leaving the shower or changing out of her nurse's scrubs, removing the athletic sweatbands the hospital now requires her to wear over her inked arms. She hides her tattoos from us as if they're evidence of some wrongdoing, as if she doesn't want Paula and me—lately always worried about money—to know what they've cost. Are we holding her back by not wanting to leave our home, or is she holding us, our savings dwindled to almost nothing with visions of community college on the horizon?

         As winter deepens, my mother's tattoos become more expansive: a black and pink Florida sunset covers almost all of her upper right arm; a fleet of sailboats, masts raised, skims across her left thigh; on her right breast, a portrait of the dark, lapping ocean, the shadowy outline of a gull with wings stretched gliding over the blue expanse of her chest. Sometimes it will be weeks before Paula and I notice a new tattoo, and then only by accident, catching a glimpse of her leaving the shower or changing out of her nurse's scrubs, removing the athletic sweatbands the hospital now requires her to wear over her inked arms. She hides her tattoos from us as if they're evidence of some wrongdoing, as if she doesn't want Paula and me—lately always worried about money—to know what they've cost. Are we holding her back by not wanting to leave our home, or is she holding us, our savings dwindled to almost nothing with visions of community college on the horizon?
         She's started seeing a man named Joe on and off, a football fanatic who always has a lit cigar dangling from his lips and a dusting of ash across the front of his shirt. Joe drives a truck for the catering company down the street, delivering pans of meat and tubs of chilled pasta salad and Jellos to reception halls. He thinks it's sexy that our mother has tattoos—he told us so one night at the kitchen table, rolling up his shirtsleeve to reveal a portrait of a winking pirate on his right bicep—and he drives her to and from appointments in his truck. "Your mother's a screamer," he says, and describes the medicinal smell of the tattoo parlor, the dull hum of the needle, the gloved hand that spends sometimes up to four hours drawing on her body. He tells us about the plastic green chair, the way her body jerks and writhes in it, the tattoo artist's impatient voice telling her to hold still or he won't continue.
         "It sounds like your mom's being murdered in there!" Joe rubs my mother's shoulder and laughs, and watching her smile back at him, I realize with a start that my old fear, the one that my mother might someday possess me, was naïve; even more frightening is the possibility that she might never possess herself, that she'll move from incarnation to incarnation like a bronze-skinned goddess stuck in a pose.