"By the Pricking of Her Thumbs" - NYC Midnight Flash Fiction 2022 challenge 2 entry
Hello darlings! This is the 2nd 1st-round challenge of the NYC Midnight 2022 Flash Fiction contest. Word count limit: 1000 Genre: fairy tale Location: tattoo parlor Item: fondue Enjoy! Synopsis: Rowena the ink-witch lives in charmed, eternal youth, sheltered by a fairy’s wish, until she tattoos a jealous neighbor’s daughter. Can she survive her neighbor’s spite? " By the Pricking of Her Thumbs" In the city, near the only used bookstore that stays open past six, there’s a natty tattoo parlor with flaming hearts pinned on all the walls. In it, a raven-haired ink-witch named Rowena stabs grateful people, making them prettier. Back when the tattoo parlor she’d worked in was only a lucrative afterthought in a barber’s backroom, Rowena was as human as you or me. Then she’d etched a fairy’s sigil over a sailor’s heart, and the fairy had given her one wish (and a basket of duck eggs) as payment. Rowena could have wished for riches, palaces,