Grey is a new novel that I am currently working on (on spec). It’s like The Picture of Dorian Gray, with more tattoos, sex and whiskey.

Here’s some randomly ordered excerpts (I will be adding more when the mood strikes):

Throughout this whole mind-ramble, Grey had been absently itching his upper arm, and when he glances over at his new tattoo, his hand drops immediately.

The eyes staring back at him are ringed in bright red. His heart constricting a bit, he reaches over and pulls the skin taunt for a better look. Yup, the skin — and only the skin in the vicinity of the sketched eyes — is raw, the blood beading under the surface, threatening to seeping out through his epidermis and run, tear-like, down his arm.

“It has to be infected,” Grey thinks. “That’s really the only explanation. I’ve been careful with it and everything, but, well, I was just fucking itching it. It’s infected.”

Still, he can’t tear his eyes away from his second pair. He stares at the face until it seems like it’s twitching. When he was younger, he had a painting of a sailing ship in his bedroom. He used to stare at it for hours, because, if he didn’t blink too much or look away, it started to look as if the waves were moving and the ship was being tossed in the foam. He imagined the sailors shouting in the hull and the ship sinking to the bottom of the ocean. He used to think that that phantom movement was a subtle kind of haunting — a ghost he conjured up with his mind.

Now the face — his face — seemed to be leering at him slightly, its evil-looking eyes holding some dark message. Grey shakes his head. “It’s fucking infected,” he says out loud, and staggers toward the first aid kit on the wall. His hands shaking a little, he smears ointment all over Grey II, hiding it behind a veil of milky goo, and wraps it clumsily with the entirety of an ace bandage. Once the face is hidden, he sighs with relief and heads out into the bar.

Grey’s vision is still a bit blurry as he leans in to cup his hand to the glass door and peer into the gloom. A face appears in front of his like a ghost materializing in a mirror when one wipes off the steam after a shower, and Grey leaps back, falls backwards onto the sidewalk. The door jingles open and a thin, bald man stands in front of him, dressed in black from head to toe. That wasn’t unusual — black is the veritable uniform of the city — no, what was curious about the man took Grey a few blinking, dumb minutes to realize: his white, shining, immaculate skin was entirely bereft of ink.

Tattoo artists — much like hairdressers and employees at tanning salons — are often replete with their wares, given that they work in such proximity to them. The collecting becomes easy, until skin becomes more ink than natural pigment, and the canvas runs out. Then their fingers itch to do more — to grow another limb and set about sketching out yet another scene on that fresh expanse. This man’s skin was just aching for a well-placed koi fish.