Inky Waters

An artist by any other name...

Image by author

Inky Waters’ eyes crinkled at the reporter’s question. She’d been asked it a thousand times. Maybe ten thousand.

“You don’t really think I’m going to answer that, do you?” She shook her head, laughing, and the reporter gave her a sheepish, “I had to give it a try,” look, then grinned back at her.

Inky really was her legal name. Her parents had let her make the change in seventh grade, finally giving up on the idea that using it was just a phase she was going through. By that point no one really remembered that it hadn’t always been her name anyway.

Her parents had named her Geraldine, after a great aunt who had left them money. It hadn’t even been that much, to be honest, but, well, you know families. She had suffered through her early school years with it, hating every time she had to answer to it.

She was an artistic kid, always doodling, even in class. Her teachers never minded. She brought home straight A’s and, whenever called on in class, had the answer the teacher was looking for on the tip of her tongue.

In grade three, she had taken to wearing overalls, keeping her doodling pens in the bib pocket. It was all cool until one day a red pen burst and leaked all over her pocket, leaving a huge, red stain.

The kids in her class started laughing and calling her Inky. She liked it. She laughed along with them and refused ever thereafter to answer to anything else.

Inky continued to doodle. She sold her first comic series to her local newspaper in grade nine. By grade twelve, she had syndicated another.  In her first year of college, she sold a graphic novel and, by the time she graduated, had her first movie option.

Inky’s smile broadened as her hand, never idle, doodled her logo—a splash of red ink across a denim pocket with her name in black ink. She was still amazed that no one had ever figured out the connection.

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This story was inspired by the name of a new member of my Friday night D&D group. Their character name is Inki Wotyrs, pronounced Inky Waters. There’s apparently some joke behind the name, which I’ve yet to pry from them.

I simply really loved the name. I like its cadence and the image of ink spreading in a cloud through still water. I thought of looking for a stock picture for the story, but decided that I’d never find anything truly suitable, so I created a terrible version of Inky’s logo. My artistic creations, whether hand drawn or computer generated leave much to be desired, but this, at least, relates to the story.