[ WP ] When a child is born , he is born with tattoos that will tell the story of his life . He spends years trying to decipher them , but - as it is with everyone - he is unable to . As life goes on , however , situations surface and he begins to understand his tattoos .

I was a wonder; my baby pictures graced the covers of tabloids, my childhood contemporaries camped out on my parents' lawn to throw rocks at our windows. The Tattooed Baby, the Inkfant, the marked child, Cain.. I'd been given many names after my parents gave me my first. I never knew my mother for a moment; the doctors said it was the most difficult birth they'd ever seen. But my father had done what he could; he just was n't cut out for the life I forced upon him by existing. I fast became able to brush aside the comments and the stares, but my father took them hard enough for us both. He tried in vain to shelter me from the cruelties of the world that did n't understand me, he tried his best. When I came home with my clothes burned and blood coming from my ear, it was his breaking point. My father left that night, and something terrible happened to the boys who'd bullied me, and then I never saw him again. That's when I began to refer to myself as Cain; and now I ca n't remember what it was before that. 
 
 As if it was n't enough to be born with medically inexplicable tattoos covering 60 % of your body, the forces that be had to make things more exhausting for me. My marks were called tattoos because no one had another word for them, but they were n't ink and they were n't pictures. Furthermore, contrary to the thousands of tattooed folks who'd tried to make me part of some type of pilgrimage, my marks hold no meaning for me. Covering my face, my arms, my torso and legs is script I can not read; script no man can read. Scrawled on me from head to toe are words in a language either long gone or not yet written, and the only thing I know about them is that they tell the story of my life; the book of Cain. 
 
 I know that's what they say. I know it the way you know the feeling of the wind or the face of a loved one; I was born knowing only one thing: The marks are your story. I was never told this by a person, never visited in a dream; I just know it as a constant, unchanging truth. I spent much of my youth attempting to decipher the code, I have notebooks piled upon themselves filled with transcriptions of the text, rearranged and mirrored and substituted and analyzed; but not one sheet yields a clue. My purpose, my path - they're as cloudy as the day I was born. The search for meaning consumed me, and without any support I allowed it to. I've spent the better part of a decade buried within the reams of paper I'd transcribed but they gave me no quarter and here I sit. This room is dark; a sliver of natural light cascades between the barnboards I hammered to the windows, dust floating carelessly on the imperceptible breeze from the radiator. A small flashlight on my desk casts it's beam onto my chest, and in the small mirror seated next to it, just for an instant, I could swear I read the words `` Get off Reddit and go outside.''
