There were only three words, painted in gold, on the window of Luka Alexeivitch’s place of business: Luka – Body Art. The window itself was tinted almost impenetrably black, so that passersby could not see inside unless they pressed their faces against the surface of the glass and shaded their eyes with their hands.
Luka’s studio was at the end of a line of boutique shops in a brick-faced structure on a quiet downtown street. The store next door was a perfumery where women with too much disposable income could try on custom fragrances made to their specifications. Trees set in cast-iron planters embedded in the concrete regularly punctuated the sidewalk. There were benches, too, and all the trappings of upscale urban living.
It was hot inside the studio, and Luka had propped open the door with a brick to let the afternoon breeze in. The air conditioning was not yet running, and the studio space was still a mess of boxes and drop cloths. The odor of fresh paint lingered in the air.
Luka Alexeivitch worked shirtless and in bare feet, wearing only a pair of faded blue jeans. He was a lean man, muscular, but his skin was white and not tanned. He was not a hairy man. Dark brown locks fell loosely to his shoulders when, as now, he did not pull it into a ponytail. The scrub of five days’ growth of beard covered his face and upper neck, but he did not appear sloppy, even when one noticed the flecks of paint that had landed on his sharp cheekbones and dried there.
The most striking things about Luka were his tattoos. His arms were covered in intricate tribal patterns of black ink: sharp lines, delicate whorls and odd angles. Along the line of his spine were stylized vertebrae that reached from the base of his skull to somewhere beneath the waist of his jeans. Both of his ears were pierced, and so were his nipples. He was an artist who practiced his own pursuit.
His studio had two floors, with the downstairs broken into one larger and one smaller space. The floors were bare concrete and the walls were raw brick. Luka knelt beside a large, cushioned chair that looked a great deal like something one would find in a dentist’s office, only the upholstery was jet-black leather and the entire apparatus was set low to the floor. Fat bolts held the chair to the floor, and Luka used a bulky wrench to tighten the nuts around the base. Sweat was slick on his skin, and pasted strands of hair to his face and neck.
When he was done, Luka put the wrench down and took a moment to sit on the cool cement floor in the heat. Though it was nearly fall, the weather had not yet changed. It seemed hotter now than it had been in the height of summer. The inside of the studio was like a cooker at mid-day, but the evening cool made it tolerable once the sun went down. |