Vivian wondered about the tattoo sometimes. It was only natural, really; she was a fairly meek and introverted woman, not generally given to impulsive behavior or wild, spontaneous decisions, and when the only time she broke that habit led to a week of Spring Break debauchery in Puerto Vallarta she didn't fully remember and a tattoo on her wrist that itched for a month and peeked out from even her long-sleeved shirts... well, it sometimes led her to wonder what prompted her to get it, that was all. Sometimes she looked down, noticed the thick black 'XIX' lettered across pale skin that made the image stand out even more strongly by contrast, and asked herself what she was thinking.
It wasn't an especially ugly tattoo, thank god. Given how blitzed or stoned or whatever she actually was when she got it, Vivian truly thanked her lucky stars that she didn't wind up with a man's penis emblazoned along the length of her forearm or a crude sexual come-on inked into the skin of her pooched belly just above her pubic mound. Vivian hadn't touched alcohol or recreational drugs since she was nineteen, and whenever anyone asked her why she absent-mindedly rubbed the tattoo and said, "I don't make good decisions when I'm drunk." Nobody had ever asked her twice.
Even the decision to get drunk felt like a bad decision she'd made when she was drunk; most of Vivian's memories of that week had disappeared down a rabbit hole of blackout alcoholic stupor, but she remembered getting to the hotel and wanting nothing more than to collapse into bed and start her vacation tomorrow before Melinda--a friend Vivian hadn't seen in almost a decade now, and one she was very glad to leave behind--cajoled her into going down to the bar for just one drink to celebrate the start of their vacation. And one drink became two, and then the nice gentleman sitting next to her bought her a third, and Vivian didn't have even the slightest recollection of sipping it because that was when the night went away into a warm and giggly haze.
And that was it. That was literally it for the whole weekend, the whole week, the whole vacation. Vivian didn't even remember waking up in the morning; as best as she could guess, she spent the whole time getting boozed up or stoned or both and woke up still so tipsy from the night before that it apparently sounded like a great idea to start the new day off with a hair of the dog that bit her. Presumably she was blackout drunk again before she even regained the capacity to form new memories, and it simply never felt like the time to sober up until she was on her last morning and trying very hard not to scratch her newly-healing tattoo. She honestly didn't know if she even saw Melinda that whole time, and she was too embarrassed to ask.
In retrospect, it was faintly terrifying, even if everything did turn out alright in the end and Vivian wound up blessed with the lucky invulnerability of the young and stupid. She could have wound up pregnant, she could have wound up with an STD, she could have wound up kidnapped and chopped into hamburger by a European tourist who hunted teenagers for sport or something... but instead she got a tattoo. A silly, meaningless tattoo she had to make up explanations for every time she was asked about it, because 'I got blind stinking drunk and made a stupid decision' didn't sound good no matter who wanted to know.
Okay, maybe that part of it was fun sometimes. Giving a straight-faced account of her victory in a pie-eating contest or her participation in a ground-breaking medical study or whatever nonsense Vivian could think of to justify an 'XIX' tattoo could be kind of entertaining, especially as she wasn't the sort of person who had a close-knit social circle that might compare stories. Sometimes she fancied it might even make her a bit mysterious, which was an oddly comforting thought for someone whose idea of excitement was wearing the same shoes two days in a row.
That was really where it rested for the next fifteen years. Vivian never went on another Spring Break vacation, Melinda got tired of trying to turn Vivian into a free-spirited party animal and the two of them gradually and unintentionally disentangled their friendship, and the whole episode gradually drifted into the rear-view mirror of Vivian's life except for the very rare times she looked down at her wrist and found herself wondering what she might have looked like walking into that Mexican tattoo parlor on that fateful day. Did the artist smell the liquor on her breath? Did they ask themselves whether this was a decision the teenage redhead was going to regret before they pulled out their needle gun and asked her what she wanted? Or was it just business as usual in a town that thrived on tourists making bad decisions?
Vivian could have gotten it removed, of course. She had a good job as a web designer, she made plenty of money and paid off her small one-bedroom condominium by the time she was thirty, and she could easily have afforded the thousand or so dollars it would have taken to erase the mistake from her skin. But somehow every time she thought about it, a wave of indecision swept over her and she always wound up putting the decision off a little while longer. It wasn't urgent, after all. She worked from home, she didn't have many friends... or any friends, not that she minded the solitude that carried her through her days... and it wasn't especially intrusive. She noticed it when she got out of the shower, she ruminated on it sometimes when she was reading. That was all.
But she did think about it. And she thought about it a lot more after she saw 'XXIX' tattooed on the wrist of a woman in her early twenties Vivian saw at the airport one day.
It was pure coincidence, honestly. Vivian didn't travel much, but she had a few clients who were still old-fashioned enough to want face-to-face meetings and they were willing to shell out a per diem that was well beyond what frugal Vivian thought of spending on herself on a daily basis. So she found herself sitting at an airport restaurant, having allotted herself plenty of extra time to get through security and as a result possessing a good few hours of free time before her flight, staring absently at the passing travelers until she noticed one with a suspiciously familiar tattoo peeking out from the sleeves of her zip-up hoodie.
Vivian surprised herself by leaping out of her seat to follow the stranger, shouldering her overnight bag and leaving a half-eaten plate of food behind her. She hadn't been given to impulsive decisions in over fifteen years, but she was sure as hell making one now, and her long legs carried her in rapid strides past business travelers and clusters of vacationing families until she came up on a woman in her twenties who might have been a younger version of Vivian herself. She darted forward a bit further, not wanting to startle the other person by clapping a hand on her shoulder, and said, "Um, excuse me?"
The woman looked over at Vivian, and the startled look on her face suggested she found their resemblance as uncanny as Vivian herself did--they both had the same fiery red hair, the same thick glasses magnifying emerald green eyes, and the same incredibly pale skin that Vivian, at least, blamed on her Irish grandmother and her indoor lifestyle. Vivian had a few inches on the stranger in height and a few extra pounds around the hips and belly, but otherwise the two of them could have been sisters.
Only they weren't. Because only one thing connected them apart from the physical resemblance. "Do, um, is yours....?" Vivian mumbled, fully aware that in the heat of the moment she probably sounded a little bit like a conspiracy theorist, before she gave up on words altogether and extended her wrist so the 'XIX' tattoo fully showed as her sleeve tugged back just a little. It felt like she was confessing to some kind of shameful secret, but at the same time she'd never felt anything more intimate in her entire life.
