Our daughter has always been very wilful. It comes with being a daughter of a witch. But as a empathic parent, I’d learned to meet her on her own terms, to compromise rather than give orders, knowing she’d soon be coming into witch powers of her own.
For her eighteenth birthday, she wanted two things - a tattoo and to attend a goth musical festival unsupervised. I negotiated hard and we eventually hammered out an agreement. She would get to go to the festival but I would be there too, transformed as a tattoo, keeping a careful eye on her. She happily agreed to these terms and, with a flick of her mother’s hand, I was transformed into a phial of black ink.
It was only as I was sloshing around in the container on route to the tattoo parlour that I had pause to realize just how badly I’d negotiated.
Holding me, she sits in the tattoo artist's chair.
“So what were you thinking of getting, sweetie?” my voice bubbles up from my glass prison. “There are these lovely Indian henna tattoos that would-”
Tipping the container over in her hands so that I slosh and roil, she gives a giggle. Any man married to a witch for twenty years learns that giggle as a matter of survival, recognises the underlying note of mischievous sadism that turns your blood cold.
“Oh no,” she says, lifting up her shirt. “I know exactly where I’m putting you.”