My brother has a tattoo of a dark cloud on the inside of his left forearm, though if you ask him he will deny the fact that it is a cloud at all. When I look at it, all I see is swirled up ink.

            “I don’t know, it just looks cool,” he’ll say to anyone who asks what it is or what it means, and I can’t help but think of Oscar Wilde with his theory of aestheticism. “Art for art’s sake,” he’d say, and my brother would probably agree, even though he probably also wouldn’t entirely know what he was agreeing with.

            When visiting our grandmother he covers it up with sleeves, knowing that she’d likely curse him to hell if she ever caught sight of it, and I can imagine he probably fears she would actually have the power to carry that out.

            With girls, though, I know he likes to wear it on full display, proud of the edge he imagines it gives him. Every girl wants a (young) man with a cloud permanently emblazoned on their bicep. I don’t know, maybe they do.

            In his sleep I wonder if it ever hangs over him, lifting up out of the skin to loom like a storm about to break. I wonder if he ever wakes up wet, drenched from the showers broken loose from the depths of his inner self, transformed into torrents of ink. I wonder if he’s ever afraid of lightning striking. I think I might be, if I lived tied to a storm cloud.

            He has this grand dream, he says, and once he has enough money I’m sure he’ll live it out. A sleeve of darkness, a sleeve of color. His own personal ying-yang, of sorts, and I think that it’s more than fitting. A rainbow to accompany his storm.

            Maybe that’s what it’s about, after all. Searching out the rainbow and the elusive pot of gold that must be hidden at the other end, if you’re Irish enough to find it. We’ve got some Irish blood in there, so it’s possible my brother could be that lucky one. Maybe he put the cloud on there in the hopes that one day it would lead him to his rainbow, his gold.

            My brother never brings up the cloud on his own, which I think is appropriate since its presence seems to follow him around like…

            He doesn’t talk about what it is, where it came from, which would almost be okay if I didn’t know that it must have come from somewhere. My brother is many things, but an artist is not one of them, so I know it didn’t come from his head. I know it didn’t come from a book of images because while I call it a cloud it really isn’t quite that.

            It’s like a blob, if a blob had character and intention and design. There are veins on it, maybe, and it’s rough around the edges, like it almost isn’t fully there at the ends. If it actually is a cloud it’s an odd one, for it’s shaped roughly like a teardrop turned on its side, wide and round on one end, then narrowed down to a point on the other. It’s a little bit beautiful, but equal parts ominous, in my wholly unartistic opinion.

            It could be an alien head, I suppose. A gruesome, decaying alien head.

            Or a blossoming of mold across his forearm, though I genuinely hope not.

            Or a large, slightly hairy beetle grown out of his skin.

            Or a spaceship. A round, fur-covered spaceship.

            I know he knows what it is and what it’s for and it kills me sometimes not to know myself. It’s like this huge chunk of my brother– or at least a chunk the size of his forearm– that I don’t know or understand, and it doesn’t sit right with me.

            But then I look at it a little longer when I’m sitting next to him and he’s not paying attention, and I think about it some more and realize that maybe it’s okay that I don’t understand. Maybe it’s enough if he does. Or enough if he doesn’t want to.

– Abigail Miles