“So I have brought inside my pouch,
a little draft of a Hokusai crane.”

Max got a tattoo after every surgery. He wanted to make something beautiful out of something painful. They were all birds, modeled after different artists. One was a crane, inscribed on his head, inspired by the Japanese artist Hokusai. In his tattoo parlor play, Max wrote these stage directions.

The tattoo artist finishes, and picks the boy up, very gently like an angel helping another angel. She offers him a compact mirror gently like an angel offering a compact mirror to another angel. He smiles and begins to check it out.

Then the boy says: “It’s dope. I really love it in this light.”

Sarah Ruhl, in Sarah Ruhl and Max Ritvo, Letters from Max