The Yellow Tattoo

I never believed in the old stories, not really. My grandmother, Nonna Rosa, told them with such relish, her voice cracking like dry leaves, her eyes wide with conviction. But I was thirteen, a city kid, and the crumbling farmhouse in the Apennine foothills was just a boring summer exile. The stone walls smelled of damp and oregano, and the only internet was a weak signal that flickered on the kitchen windowsill.

My cousins, Marco and Lucia, were older and treated me like a child. They spent their days terrorizing the village boys with slingshots and cigarette butts, while I was left to explore the dusty rooms. That’s how I found the atlas. It was in a rotting leather trunk in the attic, beneath a moth-eaten blanket. The maps were hand-drawn, faded to sepia, and marked with strange symbols. But one page, depicting the valley around our village, had a place I’d never seen on any modern map: a small hamlet named ‘San Nicola del Bosco’ — Saint Nicholas of the Woods.

I showed it to Nonna. Her face went pale as flour. ‘Where did you find this?’ she demanded, her fingers digging into my arm. I told her. She snatched the atlas from me, her knuckles white. ‘You must never speak of that place,’ she said, her voice a hoarse whisper. ‘It is cursed. They say the forest there is hungry, and it took the whole village one night. Some say… some say they still walk, their skin yellowed like old parchment, bound to the trees.’ I laughed. It was just a superstition, a ghost story to scare children. I forgot about it until the last night of my stay.

I woke to a sound like fingernails dragging across the windowpane. Not a tap, but a slow, deliberate scrape, as if something was trying to claw its way in. My room faced the edge of the olive grove, and the moon cast long, skeletal shadows. I pulled back the curtain, my heart thumping. There, pressed against the glass, was a face. Not white, but a sickly yellow, like old newspaper. The skin was cracked, and the eyes—they were not eyes, but hollow pits filled with a faint, pulsating light. It smiled. The lips didn’t move, but I heard a voice in my head, a dry rustling like dead leaves. ‘Come out to play, little one.’ I screamed and fell back, but when I looked again, the face was gone, leaving only a smear of something on the glass that looked like amber resin.

Nonna came running, her nightgown trailing. ‘What is it, bambino?’ she asked, her voice shaking. I told her about the face. She clutched her rosary so hard the beads dug into her palm. ‘You must not open that window,’ she said, her eyes darting to the glass. ‘And you must not leave this house until morning.’ She made me sleep in her room, and I lay awake listening to the wind moan through the shutters, convinced I could hear the same scraping sound, now moving along the roof.

The next morning, Nonna said I had been dreaming. But I noticed she kept the atlas locked in her wardrobe, and that the window in my room had been sealed shut with a thick, brown paste that smelled of bitter almonds. I left that afternoon, and I tried to put it behind me. But the image of that face, that yellow, smiling face, stayed with me.

A year later, my sister Elena moved into the room I had used. She was twelve, and she kept the window open at night to let in the cool mountain air. My parents had bought the farmhouse from Nonna, and we spent our summers there. I warned Elena, told her my story, but she just rolled her eyes. ‘You were just scared of the dark, Riccardo,’ she said.

On the last night before our return to the city, I heard the sound again. The scraping. I went to Elena’s door, but it was locked. I pressed my ear to the wood and heard her voice, muffled, as if she were talking to someone. ‘Yes, I see it in the tree,’ she was saying. ‘It’s a beautiful yellow light.’ My blood ran cold. I pounded on the door. ‘Elena! Open up!’ The scraping stopped. The door swung open. Elena stood there, her face pale, her eyes wide. ‘There’s a man in the woods,’ she said, her voice trembling. ‘He wants me to come see his yellow flowers.’ I ran to the window. The forest was dark, but at the edge of the olive grove, I saw a figure. It was tall and thin, and its skin glowed faintly, a sickly yellow, like a will-o’-the-wisp. It raised a hand, and on its palm, I saw a pattern, a symbol that matched the one on the atlas.

I slammed the window shut and locked it. I dragged Elena away, and we huddled in my parent’s room until morning. I never told them the truth. They blamed it on a night scare. But I knew. I had seen the tattoo, the same mark that was on the atlas page, the mark of San Nicola. And I knew that the forest was not finished with us.

At the funeral, three years later, for Elena, who died of a sudden, strange fever, her skin turned sallow in her final days, I couldn’t bring myself to look at the coffin. I know it wasn’t a disease. I know what came for her. And I know it’s still out there, in the woods, waiting for the next child who dares to look too long at the wrong window. Nonna gave me the atlas last summer, before she passed. ‘You were the one who saw it first,’ she said, her eyes clouded with age. ‘You must be the one to end it.’ I haven’t opened it yet. I’m afraid of what I’ll find. But sometimes, in the dead of night, I hear that scraping sound at my window, and I know that San Nicola is patient. It has all the time in the world.