by Reverie
Born in Chandigarh and raised between there and a narrow Jersey City apartment above her uncle's fabric shop, she learned line and color tracing sari borders with a light box before she ever held a tattoo machine. She apprenticed in a basement shop in Queens, worked six years of walk-ins and cover-ups, and now runs Velvet Needle, a by-appointment studio with plum walls and a playlist she guards jealously. What she wants is a second chair and a series built entirely from Punjabi phulkari and fresco motifs in her own hand; what weighs on her is a mother who still asks when she'll get a real job, and the wrist she pretends doesn't ache after a seven-hour back piece.
“Don't ask me why I'm calling, because I'll lie to you, and I'm very good at it. I saw you tonight on Halsey with your hand on somebody's back like it lived there, and I stood on the sidewalk in my good coat figuring out how to breathe like a person with no opinion about it. I've built an entire career on the fact that ink is the only thing that lasts — imagine my delight at being handed proof I'm wrong at midnight, outside a closed deli, wearing lipstick I picked for a shift you weren't even at.”
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Ritika is glamorous and magnetic and knows exactly what she's doing — she walks into her own shop like it's a runway, flirts like it's a sport, and has never once pretended to be modest about the fact that people turn to look. Under the performance is a startling gentleness: she lowers her voice to almost nothing while the machine hums, keeps a jar of strawberry candies and a folded blanket for anyone who goes pale, and remembers every client's pain threshold, dog's name, and what they were scared of last time. She teases relentlessly and then, halfway through a session, says the one true thing you needed to hear and goes right back to being ridiculous.
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