Disclaimer: All due apologies to Baz et al. This is just me speculating at the expense of several minor characters. What comes of letting me write when I'm in maudlin mode--others suffer.
Mother had teeth like broken coral and hair that straggled in front of her face like seaweed. She spent her days twisting newspapers round fish after dead fish, calling all the while in a shrill, salty voice for passerby to buy more, buy more.
Father had hands barnacled with calluses and a beard that grew like a bush out of his sun-baked face. He fished by day and his catches were sold at Mother's greasy stall in the market, alongside dozens of others. By night, he smuggled on the waterfront. His wife did not approve, but it brought in more money and there was no arguing with that.
They lived in a shack that always reeked of fish and the salt of the sea, nothing uncommon for their type. Their daughter was a tiny thing, all dark curls and impish eyes, who was fond of dancing down the beach, plucking shells from the slimy sand as though they were treasures. She was young enough yet to find adventure in anything, which her father used to his advantage.
So Glorianne hid under the docks some nights, dirty water swirling around her ankles, keeping watch for father, ready to call out a warning if anyone came too near.
A transaction went wrong one night. The water was warm and clammy against her skin, the breeze slick and oily. Glorianne counted discarded bottles until the moon slid behind the clouds like a smear of grease and there was nothing to do but listen for father to finish.
They didn't know he was in the habit of bringing his daughter along to provide an extra pair of eyes and ears. She was there to hear the accusations, and though she was old enough to know what swindling was, she was not old enough to understand what this had to do with father. Knowledge was thrust upon her too abruptly, in the form of the sounds of a scuffle overhead, a truncated shout in father's voice, and the thud of something big, bigger than the shark she had once seen in the market, hitting the pier above.
And she keeled over into the filthy water in the throes of too-sudden comprehension, clapping her hands over her mouth. The splash went unheard, but when she dropped her hands in order to retch, she let loose instead a wail that was impossible to mistake for the wind.
She darted from her nook then and they chased her, through streets she had never been through before--or maybe she had, everything was unfamiliar in the dark--and she ran and ran, away from the docks and home and the corpse on the pier, until she had no idea where she was. When she disappeared into the darkness, scurrying ratlike through any opening she could find, they left, muttering amongst themselves "The city will kill her, she's as good as dead there." And possibly she was, for the child was never seen again.
Years later, there could be seen around the waterfront a pale girl with mischievous eyes and a wicked smile, her dark brown hair colored a vibrant red. They called her Tattoo, with good reason. She frequented the alleys just offshore, where the sailors got inked. Tattoo was more than a whore, they gave her that much, not that it was easily deniable. Any dockside slut who's been in the trade for more than a few months is bound to wither, skin stretching tight into red and brown wrinkles by sunlight and strain. This girl remained fair, never so much as freckling; it proved her passport to a sort of underground fame.
Supposedly she had been in every town along the coast, traveling with whoever was willing to take her and showing off her artwork to pay her way. No one knew when she had started her collection, though several artists claimed to have contributed to it. They loved inking her flesh and she encouraged it for all she was worth. A nervous apprentice once marred a design, his shaking hand creating an inconsistency in the pattern she had requested. She had left in a rage, demanding full price and not spending the night, and no one thought to call her on it. If anything, the boy caught more anger than she did. From that incident onward, an unofficial rule was made clear--if their concentration was thrown enough that a mistake was made, she would raise her price and leave without staying the night. Ever afterward, her work was flawless.
It was almost funny to some, that the tattooists should pay her. Others understood--it was a privilege to have dominion of that skin. To hear that smooth voice, also strangely bereft of waterside roughness, say, "Yeah, give me another one, right here." To see the needle biting into creamy skin, incongruous amongst the weathered sailors and streetwalkers that usually patronized such places. To see her smile sassily before provocatively chewing on a lip as the needle moved, inking a dragon on her forearm, an angel on her thigh, a stained-glass spray of peacock feathers between her shoulder blades. It was a privilege.
And when she grew bored with the inkings and bored with her fame, she took to dancing the way she took to everything else--haphazardly, with a confident strut and a devil-may-care smile--and she did it well. She came into Montmartre by chance, having heard there were plenty of opportunities for that sort of thing. One of them presented itself when she came across an emaciated girl leaning against a building and smoking a cigarette.
"Hey, c'n I have one?"
The waif didn't so much as blink at the colorful arm extended before her. "Here you go."
Tattoo gratefully took it and sank against the building beside her. "Thanks. So, d'you work around here?"
"Yes, I'm a mermaid."
Tattoo laughed, recalling her days as a siren. "I've been told the same thing, darling."
The girl's pale lashes flickered and she met Tattoo's eyes from beneath a waterfall of tangled hair. "No, I'm a real mermaid. In a dancehall near here. Come by tonight, you'll see."
And so she went, emanating salt and sex and the wildness of the wharfs. As always, there was a sort of primal incandescence about her, gorgeous and inscrutable in the midst of depravity, not to mention the source of much of it. The place, she noted, seemed to match her personality nicely. So when a red-mustachioed man proclaimed her perfect and made her an offer, she did not refuse.
