As we drive to the parlor, Asad doesn’t mention my lack of compression garments, but I’m sure he noticed. My ridging skin-graft scars twist and turn down my arms and legs, and even I’m not used to seeing them so exposed like this outside lotioning hour. But I haven’t picked a spot for the tattoo yet, and I don’t want to be trying to unzip and shimmy out of my garments in public.

The tattoo parlor is nothing like I expect, which was essentially a cliché movie portrayal of leather-clad biker chicks and dudes getting inked in some dodgy back room. Instead, Asad and I walk into a spotlessly clean store smack-dab in the middle of a suburban strip mall.

With its reclining chairs and sterilized instrument trays, it’s more like a dentist’s office than my imagined skeezy den of iniquity. I try not to let the reality take anything away from my rebellious act of solidarity. Asad peruses the various images pinned to the wall like a smorgasbord of skin art. He points to one, a zipper, opening up the skin below it.

“You should totally get this one.”

I tell him skin zippers most likely violate Cora’s “horrifying grandchildren” rule, and besides, I already know what I’m getting.

Asad turns to face me, one eyebrow cocked.

“Please tell me it’s not some Chinese proverb. Half the time those don’t even say what you think they do and you walk around your whole life thinking your wrist says ‘hope and love’ but it really says ‘Where’s the toilet?’ ”

I unfold the burn-camp brochure from my back pocket and point to the bird.

“I’m getting that,” I say. “Like Piper’s.”

“Piper as in phoenix Piper?” a voice behind us asks. A guy barely older than us rustles through a beaded curtain behind the front desk. He doesn’t have the bearded, leather-vested look I hoped for, but with his man bun and thick, black-framed glasses, he does give off a certain just-got-high-on-my-hookah-in-the-storage-room vibe that will have to do. On his bicep, a colorful dragon tattoo curls around his arm down to his wrist.

“You know Piper?” I ask.

“You bet. I did her ink.” He reaches his hand out to me. “Gabriel.”

“Ava.”

“Well, Ava. Any friend of Piper is welcome here. A fellow Viking, I presume?”

I nod.

“Me too. Graduated last year. Your girl Piper was my first solo job, actually. She came in here demanding something majestic, something out-of-this-world—” He smiles at me. “Something to give her wings. So I did. How is she?”

I pause.

“Not great, actually. Kind of why I’m here.” I hold out the burn-camp brochure. “I want to get a phoenix like hers. But not my whole back or anything.”