Ken Foxe
The Three Burning Castles Problem
My mammy always said to me I should never get a tattoo, and good son that I was, I did exactly what I was told. When she passed away though, her gentle heart packing in after a lifetime of cigarettes and dry cider, that cleared a path for me. It was a month or so after Dublin had done the six-in-a-row, and I was flush with cash. Mammy had a few thousand euro – a few old punts included – stashed away under her mattress. I’d known nothing about it, which was good in a way. I would probably have ‘borrowed’ half of it before she departed, may the lord grant her eternal rest.
As an only son, I’d been making solid progress in spending my unexpected windfall. But I’d nothing to show for it bar new jeans and t-shirts to replace the old ones that had gotten a little too snug from all my bonviverie. I’d the day off work from my job in the bean factory and had frittered away much of the afternoon drinking down in Phibsboro. There was a spring in my step as I headed home and as I made my way up towards Connaught Street, I noticed a newly opened tattoo parlour just across from the shopping centre.
It was called Idle Ink, its lettering in an old playbill font, and I liked the ring of its name. The outside was decorated like an old saloon from one of those Western films my daddy loved. And as I pushed open the door, a little bell chimed to inform the proprietor of my arrival and mid-life crisis.
The tattooist was beautiful in a way that left even an inveterate raconteur like me without words.
“Hello,” was the best I could muster.
“Hi,” she said, her voice deep like you could swim in it. “Can I help you?”
“I was thinking of getting a tattoo,” I said as I counted her piercings. One in her nose, another in her cheek, both eyebrows, half a dozen in each ear, her bellybutton … God only knew where else because I never would.
“Have you something in mind?” she asked, my eye drawn to a green and yellow Brazilian flag stencilled on her upper arm, which almost seemed to billow with its blue disc turning.
“Maybe something to do with Dublin.”
She smiled at me, and I was doing all I could to stop my mouth opening and closing like an old trout.
“You’ll have to give me … well, a bit more to work with,” she said.
I pulled out my phone, which helped focus my mind, because it meant I wasn’t looking straight at her anymore. I searched Safari for Dublin and Gaelic football, and the old county crest with the three burning castles popped up.
“Something like this maybe,” I said, showing her the screen.
She took the mobile from me and even her hand was able to draw my eyes helplessly as I noticed the teal nail polish on her delicate fingers.
“I’ve seen this before,” she said.
“So, how does this work? Do I make an appointment and come back?”
“We could do it right away if you like.”
“And do you do it exactly like the photo on my phone?”
“I could,” she said. “Or you could trust in my imagination?”
And I’ll be honest, she could have asked me to go swim across the Liffey on a snowy January morning in my y-fronts, and I would have caught my cold, and probably drowned.
I laid out on the black leather reclining chair, eyes closed. It put me in mind of being in the dentist’s but with the scent of recently smoked marijuana befogging the air instead of antiseptic and mouthwash.
“What’s your name?” she asked me.
“Christy,” I said. “And you?”
“Gabriela.” Each of the four syllables, gentle waves breaking on warm sand.
“Ga-bree-ay-la,” I whispered.
“How are you with pain?” she asked.
What answer could I give except to say ‘grand’ even though the flu jab from the nurse every November would make me wince. And while the vibration of the needle was sore, it wasn’t so bad. Moderate pain, when you know it won’t get any worse and will soon be over, tends to stay self-contained and tolerable.
“How long has the shop been open?” I asked her.
“Just this week,” said Gabriela. “A pop-up until our main parlour is ready.”
“Pop-up?” I said. “Hmmm.”
By the time I left, three hours had passed, which was peculiar because it felt like a quarter of that. Perhaps the lingering aroma of cannabis had caused some mild sedation because all I wanted to do was sleep. My eyes were heavy as I looked at the finished tattoo. It was exquisite. I don’t own the words to describe it well, except to say that Gabriela seemed as gifted as anybody I had ever met.
She sent me on my way, upper arm wrapped in clingfilm, and a sheet of instructions on how to take care of my freshly inked body. In the living room of my small house in Cabra that evening, I read through them. How I could expect soreness and sensitivity. That this might last for up to a week. If it didn’t seem to settle, that there could be an infection. But that the chances of this were low. I fell asleep right there on the couch, the A4 page landing on my mammy’s well-worn Persian rug. I found it there the next morning, ink smudged, the text indecipherable.
It wasn’t my priority though because when I first awoke, my skin was clammy, and I had an overwhelming nausea. I was sure I was going to get sick but when I raced to the toilet, nothing came. My stomach though; it felt like a tumble drier filled with citric acid. Growling. Cursing at me.
I took a Nexium tablet from the medicine press, washed it down with a glass of full fat milk. That seemed to ease the gurgling, but I still felt a little feverish and had to wipe my brow with a dishcloth. I didn’t link it to the tattoo at first, instead blaming a bad pint from the previous afternoon. Talking to the factory supervisor on the phone, I knew he thought I was on a bender again when I told him there was no way I could make it in.
I dragged myself up the stairs and flopped down on my bed. I hadn’t changed my clothes from the night before and I stank. But I couldn’t muster the energy to change into pyjamas or go for a shower. Lying there, I would sometimes wrap myself tight in the quilt. Other times, I could hardly stand for an inch of the duvet to be touching me. My tattooed arm was burning but so too was the other undecorated one, along with my forehead, neck, chest, legs, and every other appendage.
The hours simmered away so that when my temperature finally came down, it was already getting dark outside. It was drizzling, dark clouds in the sky, one of those winter days where the sun seemed hardly to have risen at all. By then I felt okay, given the circumstances. I heated chicken soup in the microwave, drank it directly from the Tetra Pak, and gulped down two Solpadeine. I looked at my covered arm, the three burning castles blurred beneath the cellophane. It was itchy but I was able to resist the urge to scratch.
North by Northwest was playing on the TV, and I remembered how my mammy used to love Cary Grant, and that famous suit he wore. She used to say daddy looked like him when he was younger, but I’m not sure who she thought she was fooling. The warm soup settled my stomach, so that I was able to eat a banana sandwich as well. I stayed watching the telly, dozing off for a few minutes here or there. And by the time I headed back upstairs, I had a hope like the worst of what ailed me was over.
It was a little after 3am when I awoke feeling like my arm was ablaze. Not just where the tattoo was but all down through my forearm, wrist, and into my fingers. My hand instinctively went up to where the clingfilm was before I grabbed the crook of my elbow tight hoping it would ease the pain. I staggered to the ensuite bathroom, turned on the light, approached the mirror. Terrified as I wondered what I would see.
My entire arm was covered in ink now, from top to bottom. I tore off the wrapping and I could see the tattoo was in motion. There was a Viking longboat sailing down along the central vein, the one doctors use for taking blood. I could see the meandering Liffey and the Black Pool as they were before the quays tamed them. There were bonfires on each riverbank, and it was there that my arm burned most intensely. The wooden ship scythed through the water, pushed forward by twenty lines of fierce bearded Norsemen, the strokes of their oars rippling and fluttering on my skin. It seemed as if arrows were being fired toward the boat, and each would land like a sharp pin on me that would dimple and pierce the surface, then vanish subcutaneously.
I’m not sure what happened after that, but I must have made it back to bed and I didn’t come to until midday. I looked first of course to my arm, the protective film removed, the tattoo at peace. It occurred to me that what had happened was a dream until I stood again before the mirror, and I saw smoke rising from the top of the three castles and felt skin that was warm to the touch.
Strangely, I felt fine otherwise. The fever seemed to have passed and I was well enough to walk back down to Phibsboro to speak to Gabriela. It was a crisp day, the barest tickling of winter sun on my back. I tried to think of what I was going to say as I passed by Eddie Rocket’s and came to the pedestrian lights.
‘That can’t be right,’ I muttered to myself as I looked across to where the tattoo parlour should have been. The premises was almost derelict, its large display window boarded up. It was covered in anti-fascist posters and tagged with graffiti. ‘Am I after getting confused,’ I wondered? ‘Was it further up the road?’ But as I looked along the streetscape, there was nowhere else it could have been – all the other buildings were occupied.
There was a charity shop next door, so I went inside and spoke to an older lady at the cash register.
“Did the tattoo shop next door close down?” I asked.
“Tattoo shop?” she said.
“Yeah, a pop-up shop or something.”
“That building’s been empty these years.”
My arm began to burn again, and I could feel beads of sweat on my forehead. It was like a hot flush, as the strength wept out from my legs and left me wobbling. I wondered if it was a panic attack; mammy had suffered that affliction.
“Have you a bathroom?” I asked.
“No,” she answered, “try McDonalds.”
With every step, it felt as if I might topple over, like a Slinkie teetering on the top of the stairs. I tried to gather myself in the restroom, sitting on the toilet seat, my t-shirt pushed up above my shoulder. The fire atop the three castles was raging now, and for the first time in my life, I wondered if I was going insane. All I could see was myself in the fraying armchair of a psychiatrist’s office, talking of hallucinations and hospitalisation.
Maybe it was the fever. I remembered a teenage flu when my temperature soared to 102 and how dreams, nightmares, and wakefulness began to coalesce and fuse. Perhaps it was just an infection and so I took my phone and called the office of my GP, Doctor Devlin. I told them it was urgent, and they said there had been a cancellation.
“Could you come in at 5.20pm?” the secretary said.
“I’ll be there.”
Dr Devlin was visibly tired when I arrived. I must have been the last appointment in a long day of chest infections, mild depression, lonely pensioners, and suspicious lumps. He was a white-haired man in his early sixties with the demeanour of a school principal. Whenever I sat at his desk, I always felt like a naughty boy banished from his classroom. It was hard to know what to say either and I was terrified of looking foolish. I knew the strange phenomenon of my dancing tattoo was better kept secret.
“Christy,” he said. “I haven’t seen you since your mam’s funeral.”
“Yeah, and I meant to thank you for coming.”
“And what can I do for you today?”
“I did something stupid Doctor Devlin; I got a tattoo and I think it’s infected now.”
“You’re a bit auld for that,” he laughed.
He asked me to take off my top. Around the edges of the burning castles, there was an obvious redness, but at least they were no longer moving. There were a dozen small angry bumps too around the perimeter and as Dr Devlin moved his head from side to side, shining a tiny torch, he pursed his lips.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “I think there’s a bit of an infection all right. Nothing of too much concern but I’m going to give you a script for an antibiotic. It’ll bring that redness down and if there’s pain or tenderness, paracetamol should do the trick.”
“Thanks doctor; it was a silly thing to do.”
He sat back and rubbed the palm of his hand on the crown of his head.
“Ah,” he said, “if I was a young man these days, no doubt I’d have one myself. Do you know the story of the three castles by the way?”
I gritted my teeth in ignorance, a touch embarrassed. I’d never really given it very much thought.
“Was it that Dublin Castle was burnt down three times?” I asked.
“That’s what you’d think all right. But nobody really knows. Some say it’s that the people would do anything to defend their home. Obedientia Civium Urbis Felicitas, the obedience of the citizens produces a happy city.’”
“I was never much good at Latin in school.”
“It was an acquired taste.”
I managed to get the prescription filled at the local chemist, just minutes before they were due to close. I dry-swallowed the first amoxicillin tablet as I walked home, thinking there was no point in wasting any time. And as I sat on the sofa that evening, taking my time over three cans of Tuborg, checking my arm every other minute, it felt like the redness was dimming.
Falling asleep was never easy for me. Unless of course I’d enough drank that I might fall into a stupor, readying myself for the hangover to come. But that night when I stretched out on the bed – ear plugs snug, eye shades on – I must have dropped off straight away. I have no remembrance of tossing or turning, or a racing mind despite all that had happened. And that made my sudden awakening just after 3am even more jolting.
It is hard to describe how it feels for every centimetre of your arm to feel in motion even as it is still. It was as if it had been invaded by a colony of ants that were searching out breadcrumbs or grains of sugar. In one moment, there would be burning, the next pulling, stretching, and piercing. And that was only in the sixty seconds it took me to regain my equilibrium and stagger to the bathroom.
In the mirror, I could see my arm pulsing and quivering. Two ferocious gangs of men – the weavers and the butchers – were at battle. Forty men on either side, armed with clubs, pikes, stones, and cleavers slashed and hacked at one other, and my skin. Routed, the butchers fled to their shambles but were followed and attacked again. Six or seven died, dozens more were injured; arms, backs, legs, heads twisted and broken open. The bloody skirmish only ended when soldiers came to disperse them.
As the confrontation ended, my arm returned to normal, like ink was spilling from a fountain, but in reverse. All that remained were the three burning castles, light smoke drifting up from the crenelation. And then that too ceased, so that peace descended upon my body once more.
It doesn’t happen nightly, only every three or four days. I saw firsthand the Fenian Rising and the execution of Robert Emmet. I watched shells rain down on Dublin from the Liffey; the GPO and Four Courts left in rubble. Nelson’s Pillar exploded on my bicep, and along my brachioradialis, the Invincibles stabbed Lord Cavendish with surgical knives.
I spend my free time poring over history books trying to piece together the lesser-known events that unfold on the skin that covers my ulna, radius, and humerus. The tattoo occasionally spreads so that my chest and other arm become illuminated too. Will it someday cover me entirely?
I’ve learned to live with the pain as it ebbs away when each spectacle ends. My body has become a cinema screen, an animated portal to the past. All I wish for now is that it would happen every night.
Ken Foxe is a writer and transparency activist in Ireland. He is the author of two non-fiction books based on his journalism and a member of the Horror Writer’s Association. He has had around three dozen short stories published in a wide variety of journals, magazines, and anthologies. You can find him on Instagram (@kenfoxe) and Twitter/X (@kenfoxe). www.kenfoxe.com/short-stories/
