Yay! Tattoos & Portents is up!

I’m doing a happy dance around the house.  My chihuahua’s staring at me like I’m nuts.  My husband joined the conga line, and my cat’s unimpressed.  But then, it’s hard to impress Dutchy.

Muddy River 4 came from an idea my husband had and kept pestering me with.  He looked at images of tattoos online and could picture them moving to “talk” to each other.  He mentioned it so many times, I decided to use it in my book.  I already had Druids near Muddy River whose tattoos writhed and could stretch to grab someone.  I just needed to come up with a new twist for this story.  And I had a lot of fun having people leave Muddy River and return with a tattoo staining their right arm and incessant dreams that repeated themselves over and over again.

When Festus, a friend of Hester and Raven’s, leaves on a business trip, he returns with a tattoo he can’t remember getting and dreams that make him lose so much sleep, he can hardly function.  When he asks Hester for help, she realizes the tattoo was placed on his arm by a witch who’s imprisoned in a voodoo priest’s basement, and the dreams are cries for help.  But where is the witch?  And how do they find her?  Soon, they discover there are more people with tattoos, and each one holds one piece of the witch’s story.  To fit them together, Hester must touch each tattoo and let the vision it contains open up for them to watch, sort of like looking into a crystal ball.

And that’s how I got the idea for the cover of the book.  I wanted a background that would give a dream-like feel, and a Celt tattoo like the ones the witch implanted on peoples’ arms.  And I wanted something to suggest that Hester was seeing visions of the scenes the witch sent them.  And this is what I ended up.  Hope you like it.