Once the tribal tattooist stepped forward, it seemed to signal to the others to do the same. They rushed towards me, and this time I could hear their voices. “We told you not to touch the picture!” They shouted, voices tripping over each other. I was still a little bit dumbstruck, but I managed to find my own voice. “I couldn’t hear you,” I said. “That’s why I was leaning closer and trying to touch it.”
I asked them how they became trapped here in the first place, and they said they were all in the studio getting work done when a pink light began flickering from the frame. They turned to look at it when they were transported out of the local tattoo shop. Brisbane fell away and was replaced by the beach. When I had finished listening to this explanation, the lead tattoo artist pointed behind me.
Since I had arrived on this strange black and white beach land, I had been staring straight ahead at the other people who were there. I hadn’t looked behind me yet. I turned around and my mouth fell open. It was as though I was looking at a television two hundred times my size – a television that was set to a channel that looked exactly like the tattoo studio I had just left. The chairs were still there, the lights were still flickering, and the traditional tattooist designs were still laid out on the table.
It was like I was a doll, living in a doll house and looking out at the human world. Just as I suspected, it seems I had shrunk down to the size of a stick figure on a sheet of paper, and had somehow been transported into the tattoo sketch itself. The full force of what had just occurred suddenly hit me. I was inside a drawing. Did that mean I was a drawing myself? How would we get out of here? Were we stuck in this drawing forever? When I turned to face the others, their faces seemed to say what I was thinking.