[ 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 fucked. 
 
 I knew that even before I struggled out of my t-shirt and craned my neck like a spooked owl to look at the space between my shoulder blades, my skin jaundiced and my wrinkles like canyons in the one yellow lightbulb above the bathroom sink of the bar between Fifth Ave and Broadway. It was there as it had always been: a lucky clover with a teardrop in the middle. 
 
 There was a light knock on the door and I jumped. *Geez, get ahold of yourself! * 
 
 `` You okay, Ed?'' 
 
 I wiped the sweat from my forehead. The shape of my clover was burnt into my eyes and I saw it wherever I looked, as sure as I saw the imprint of that heinous uncovered lightbulb. 
 
 `` Be right out,'' I called. `` Just a bit nauseous.'' 
 
 My signs had never been any easier to decipher than anyone else's. Yeah, there were always those psychics and prophets who claimed they could read them—for a small price—but in the end it was nothing more than guesswork. For everyone. There's the little splash of color on my right palm, a bottle green, the shade of my mother's eyes. The pictograms continue in a spiral around my arm same as anyone else's. First I can remember that had any significance was the blaze of fire round my forearm. My whole childhood there was this sense of foreboding that surrounded it. 
 
 My whole family skirted around the subject. I was too young to understand the meaning of subjects considered to be'taboo.' 
 
 Yet, it turned out that when my first apartment burned down, I moved in next door to the woman who would later became my wife. How's that for foreboding? 
 
 After this I kind of stopped obsessing over my signs. People drove themselves crazy over them. Went mad. People killed themselves just trying to fulfill prophecies that may or may not have ever been true. How do we know what's what until it happens? That's all I have to say. Anyway, as a police officer I kind of have to think this way. Innocent until proven guilty and all that. 
 
 When I opened the door, my partner was leaning against the door jamb looking thoroughly pleased with himself. `` Had a good piss?'' he inquired politely. 
 
 `` Fuck off,'' I answered, equally saccharine. 
 
 `` You never go all queasy like that,'' Jordan went on, sobering up as he followed me back through the nearly empty bar to the place of my deepest suppressed nightmares. `` You alright? You do n't have to stay, you know, if you're upset. God—'' A horrific thought seemed to occur to him and he squeezed my shoulder, where underneath a picture of a broken stained glass window fanned out from there to my neck. `` You did n't *know* her, didja?'' 
 
 I shrugged him off. The freakin clod knew me better than that. Instead of answering I knelt down, between fussing officers, paying no mind to the consistent *flash, flash, flash* of a camera freezing this moment in history, just like it was frozen on this woman's skin. 
 
 Her hair was red, but it was also wet and matted and I suspected red was not its natural color. She was young. 
 
 I was also young. 
 
 The overwhelming majority of people were born with their signs out of order. Sure you'd have your birthmark on your hand, but after that it was a general mess. You could have your graduation on your wrist and your second birthday on your lower back. One thing everyone had in common though, and I mean everyone, was the sign. Your deathmark. Your birthmark goes on your palm... and your deathmark in the space between your shoulder blades. Funny enough, this is just about one of the only places on your body you ca n't touch with the palm of your hand. Anyway, the philosophers can debate on that one till the cows come home. 
 
 Jane Doe here did me the everlasting courtesy of dying face down, so that with the delicate descending V-line on the back of her dress, all her tattoos that were n't spattered in blood were visible. Including the lucky clover with the teardrop silhouetted in the middle, square between her shoulder blades. 
 
 `` No,'' I told Jordan. `` I did n't know her.'' 
 
 But I was pretty sure I'd be meeting her soon.
