For 12 years, I looked at the woman’s face inked onto my husband’s shoulder and wondered why he would never tell me who she was. Then one afternoon, I ran into her by chance inside a bakery, and the fear in her eyes made me realize I had been asking the wrong question the entire time.
From the very first day I met Ryan, I noticed the tattoo. It was not a name, not a rose, not one of those abstract symbols people claimed carried some deep meaning.
It was a woman’s face, a detailed portrait. She appeared young, perhaps in her early twenties, with dark hair, thoughtful eyes, and a sadness in her expression that never seemed to disappear.
At first, I said nothing. We had only started dating, and I wanted to be the kind of girlfriend who did not feel threatened by things that existed before she came along.
Whenever Ryan wore a tank top, there she was. Whenever we went to the beach, there she was. Whenever he turned over in bed, there she was.
Watching.
Eventually, curiosity won.
“Who is she?”
Ryan barely looked at the tattoo. “Nobody.”
Not enough to start an argument, but enough to stay in my mind.
Several years later, after we became engaged, I brought it up again. This time he laughed.
“There isn’t some big story.”
“Click here to read the full story”.
