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It was a clear afternoon. The girl lay in a small room, the curtains closed, her underwear removed, and her breasts were unconcealed in front of another girl full of tattoos.
Fancy stared at the girl for a few seconds, spraying her with alcohol, applying transfer paste, and drawing the pattern.
"It's going to hurt a little bit in this position, you've got to relax." She said. The girl nodded in trust.
Fancy put on her gloves and picked up the needle, and she was ready.
Her fingers tightened the skin under the girl's chest, raised the needle, and then plunged it down.
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As a professional tattoo artist, Fancy has 22 tattoos on her body.
But she told me, "Tattoos are things that don't make sense." ”
Fancy's first tattoo was tattooed in her junior year of high school, at the ankle. It was a pattern that she later thought was terrible, and at the bottom was a line of English letters "LOOVE".
The teacher saw it, asked her if she had pasted it, and asked her to wipe it off.
She retorted that people's skin is wiped when it is wiped, do you think it is a blackboard? I'm an adult and it's my choice. The teacher was silent for half a moment, and did not bother her again.
Fancy's self-introduction on social software is: tattoo artist + independent female photographer + piercing artist + model + costume designer.
In most of the photos, she is exaggerated, and her exposed arms and chest are crawling with tattoos. Wearing lip and nose nails, rubbing dark lipstick, wearing sunglasses, expressionless. Looks aggressive.
The following fan comments are almost all praise: "beautiful", "cool", "special".
But back in her daily life, she could often feel the look of appreciation beyond that.
Once, she was walking on the road and saw an aunt staring at her, her eyes full of bright contempt. She could clearly hear a whispered curse coming from behind her: "Girls dress like this, I really don't want a face..."
In the face of the above statement, Fancy shrugged his shoulders without question, "Okay, I just think I'm very ordinary." However, as I walked with her, I could still feel the gaze from all directions at all times.
Last night, while we were eating at a crowded mall, she rode a black scooter in. The vast mall suddenly became her amusement park.
Most of the people who passed by looked back in surprise, and there were many aunts who stopped to take pictures. She shuttled through these eyes, driving her own leaf boat, quickly paddling through the crowd.
"I'm afraid people will talk about me." Fancy stopped and the cart walked slowly. "But I also want to be known to a lot of people."
The day fancy was interviewed was her first day in the new studio.
In between conversations, Fancy picked up a phone call. After a few hurried chats, she angrily grabbed a handful of hair:, I was actually put on the plane by the cleaning company! ”
She turned back to the living room full of boxes and felt for a cigarette in the mess.
Crouching in a red plastic chair in the living room, Fancy began to call: "Hey, how does your cleaning aunt charge?" ”
Suddenly, I remembered that some time ago, she participated in the International Performance Art Exhibition in Beijing.
She performed with her friends, and the two completed a tattoo of each other in the case of hanging upside down in mid-air, dangerous and full of beauty.
And Fancy, who was on the phone asking "how much does it cost to spend an hour", made me feel very divided. She shook her head, "No matter what you do, don't people have to live a life?" ”
Every morning, she gets up, cooks herself breakfast, turns on the music, and cleans up the studio. After noon, we welcome guests with tattoos.
She has a lot of brand new toothbrushes, panties and towels at home. This is a preparation for guests from out of town: if it is too late, you can not stay in the hotel and stay directly at her house.
Fancy's definition of her profession is simple: serving the people. Guests make appointments, determine ideas, draw up designs, revise, finalize, tattoos complete.
She said that when picking guests, "Some guests want to ask me to tattoo those dragon and phoenix patterns, and I will refuse." ”
After a pause, she added: "But when you don't have money to eat, you will occasionally take one or two orders like this." ”
There was another pause, "Am I being too honest?" Don't write this paragraph. ”
When I wondered if Fancy would come into contact with many of the guests' stories, she replied to me this way: "I think a lot of people overestimate the meaning of tattoos. ”
Meaningless is one of Fancy's criteria for selecting guests.
She tried to complete a piece in five minutes— the guest's request was simple, with only five dots tattooed on each of the five fingers.
There was also a time when the girl took off her blouse and was stabbed by Fancy for more than an hour, just wanting to have a favorite flower on her chest.
There are also uncles over 50 years old who come to her and tattoo an anchor on their arms, just because they want to be cool.
Fancy asked, "Are you working at work and aren't afraid of being told?" ”
The guest smiled meaningfully: "I didn't dare when I was young." Now that I am almost 50 years old and have become a leader, does anyone dare to say that I am? ”
This is Fancy's second year in the industry, and she has handled more than a hundred people. And she just wants to be a mere recorder.
"Why does everything, everyone, have to make sense?" She asked me that.
Some people just want to record the state of the moment, some people want to remember something; and many more people, who don't think about anything, just want to leave something on them.
Her function is a narration, a teleprompter, a tattoo pin.
But there are some stories that Fancy can't forget, even if they're just a tattoo pin.
A boy once added her WeChat and sent a message saying that his girlfriend had cancer and wanted to find Fancy to design a pattern for them as a souvenir, and hoped that she could give them encouragement.
But in the WeChat stuffed with messages, Fancy missed a lot of things. Include this message.
It wasn't until three or four months later that the boy found Fancy and told her that his girlfriend had died. His dog also left a month after his girlfriend's death.
She designed a painting for the boy, but he never came to tattoo it.
Flipping through WeChat, Fancy found the message that the boy had sent her at the time. "I didn't pay attention and didn't reply..." Her eyes were a little out of focus, "I can't imagine his mood, I regret it." ”
This became one of Fancy's few regrets.
When she was a student, she began to try to be financially independent, earning her own tuition through part-time work. But because of this, no matter what the fee, she will always be the last student in the class to pay.
In order to avoid the class teacher who urged her to pay, she would flee into the toilet cubicle and close the door, shouting: "When I pay my salary, I will pay it!" ”
In a history class, the teacher woke Fancy up, pointed to the cigarette she had placed on the table, and asked, "Is this your cigarette?" She nodded.
The teacher took out his cigarette from his pocket and sighed very emotionally: "My students smoke hibiscus king, but I can only afford to smoke a good life..."
"Aren't they very upset that I'm so disobedient and want to take my family's money?" That was her original intention.
In her sophomore year of high school, she escaped from school for half a year, volunteered in a homestay, painted, designed clothes, and met all kinds of friends.
Someone asked her, "Where did you want to go and what did you want to do when you escaped?" Without hesitation, she said, "I want to walk to Lhasa." ”
Her idea was both urgent and naïve— a pilgrimage to Tibet. She felt that as long as she arrived, she could transcend herself.
But at the age of 18, she didn't make it happen.
The end result was that she returned to school, re-attended for a year, and then gave up the road to further education and decided to make tattoos a career.
"Later, I actually went to Lhasa and found that it was nothing more than that." Four years later, Fancy, 22, looked out the window at the tall buildings of the city and said to me calmly.
Now, there are still many people who envy Fancy's state of life.
But what they don't understand is that the complex gaze Fancy feels doesn't escape just because she swipes past the scooter.
Once she was a model taken by a very famous advertiser, and one day, the other party told Fancy that her tattoo must be covered, afraid that the impact will not be good.
For an instant, something stung her.
"There will always be people who are not accustomed to people, and those people don't understand tattoos." Fancy compared the tattoos on her body, "They all think that your appearance and heart are what they imagined." ”
But in the end, she changed into strict clothes and completed the shooting as required.
On the day she first met Fancy, she had a plain face, two eye bags that she wasn't going to hide; she was wearing an old T-shirt, thin and thin—she had just been discharged from the hospital.
On the balcony on the 18th floor, the wind was so unfriendly that it seemed to be deliberately blowing her down.
Brushing a handful of her short hair that had been blown up, Fancy smiled and said, "My mother calculated my life and said I could live to be 94 years old, and there was nothing to worry about." ”
I stood on the balcony blowing the wind, which was the first autumn breeze in Guangzhou with a cool feeling.
Looking through the glass at Fancy in the room, she was packing her bags under the light, a little tired, but with a calm expression.
Others envied her freedom and possession. Only she knew that even the light overhead was earned by herself, needle by needle, needle by needle, and hard work.
I remember Fancy standing on that balcony with God's perspective, looking deeply at the traffic beneath her feet. At that time, she looked neither tall nor small. Just like the average person she said.
She said, "Do you know what my real name is?" My name is Shao Fanxi. My dad gave it to me. ”
"It means, it's ordinary and it's rare."