[ 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 .

His laughs rang through the hospice at three in the morning. At room 3B Myles Anderson lay limply across a bed of pillows, sheets, and a single morphine drip. 
 
 
 
 The markings are never chronological, adding to their cruel game of chance and certainty, but their placement was always definite: one for each limb. Anderson lay awake struggling to sleep despite his liberal use of his “ comfort button ”, mashing it every fifteen minutes. Eight attempts since midnight had helped nothing but make him forget about that radius he had broken that decided to never heal properly despite the number of times a doctor had tried to break and set it. He decided that trying to solve the world ’ s puzzle would pass the time. 
 
 
 
 He looked at his left leg, this one he knew for certain. A crude ring traced jaggedly around his knee, stopping for a hair-line keeping the ring from ever being complete. Jenny, Abigail and Melissa. He had asked them each to marry him. Melissa was right, they were too young. Jenny was right, they were too old. But Abigail, sweetest Abigail, the girl with the golden hair and imperceivably hollow green eyes. She would look at him with those eyes and he would fall away to another time, another place, some bastion for his mind. It was not fair that she was gone, and he wasn ’ t. 
 
 
 
 The right arm was particularly cryptic; seven splotches along his forearm, almost forming a perfect line with only three of the marks breaking the impression. He had many theories for these: the seven positions he held in his life, seven cars he drove, his current number of grandchildren. But he always suspected one thing over the others: his patents. Dr. Anderson started university when he was eighteen and never left. He had advanced from undergraduate, to postgraduate, to doctoral student and finally to being the head of “ Applied Aeronautical Rotor Thermodynamics ” – a department he had founded and toiled in for decades now. These seven patents ensured he had enough money to retire years ago, but he returned to the university every day to the reliable greeting of the dean begging him to accept tenure and undergraduate students wondering into his workshop, lost, looking for “ Maths 1A ” in the next building over. 
 
 
 
 Anderson looked over to his right arm now, and the think three lines running from his wrist to his shoulder, with the left lane formed by them dirtied by a heavy spray of black. He knew what this was but would never think about it or look upon it. He would never think about that night the drunk driver crossed into the wrong line. The moment he stumbled out of his car and saw the person in the other car - torn into a slurry of pieces stitched back together by a trail of that spray – that was the moment he began to try and bleach it from his mind. After all these years he was extremely close. 
 
 
 
 Two pieces remained, but the one on his right leg was the easiest to see: a simple grid made of only a few lines. Only now did he realize. From the day Anderson could write he would be completing puzzles. While the other kids were playing in the yard, he was completing a word search. While the teenagers were on their phones and smoking in the bathroom he was creating his own fiendish mathematical puzzles which no one seemed to understand. And in university he would leave the engineering campus to go and speak to the English professor about the newest New York Times crossword. The first day he could no longer hold a pen or think of the answer to a simple clue was the first day he would begin his road here. 
 
 
 
 Finally, the one on the side of his neck. Anderson looked upon his right arm and begged it to do something. He lay there under the effect of all the drugs, or something else, catching up and time passed with his arm ignoring him. Finally, it yielded to his will and took a labored flight to the small hand mirror on the bureau. He manage to pick it up by a feeble grasp of his middle and index finger before dropping it on a pillow that was left on his chest. He was able to make the strange marking out, it had always appeared to be some writing, but of what he could never be sure. But as he starred into the mirror it finally clicked, one last puzzle for the illustrious Doctor Myles Anderson to solve. The writing had always been reversed when he had looked at them. His thought was labored as he tried to mentally form the script in his mind until it was written there for him to read. 
 
 
 
 > 03:00, 3B 
 
 
 
 Anderson looked at the clock and the reversed label of the glass door. A wild smirk took his face. 
 

