Harley’s Eeyore Tattoo Ends His Relationship with BB

Harley James’s Eeyore tattoo ends his relationship with BB Easton by turning an eagerly anticipated declaration of devotion into a humiliating and irreversible surprise. After weeks of designing possible portraits for him, BB Easton rushes to the tattoo parlor expecting to see her own image on his body. Instead, Harley James has chosen the depressed donkey Eeyore, a choice that makes her feel not cherished but abruptly released from the place she had imagined herself occupying in his life.

Background and Expectation

For weeks, Harley James asked BB Easton to draw designs for a tattoo of her likeness. She produced roughly twenty-five possibilities, including sad clown, sugar skull, Bettie Paige, bionic angel, and gutter-punk versions of herself, the last armed with brass knuckles and a baseball bat. He studied the details with an attention she had rarely seen him give anything. His focus mattered as much as the proposed tattoo: BB Easton read it as evidence that he loved both her and her art enough to carry them permanently on his body. The prospect sent her fragile teenage ego soaring.

That excitement existed alongside a more troubling awareness. BB Easton knew that letting a boyfriend permanently mark his skin with her likeness was a serious commitment, even though she thought their relationship might last only about six months. At the time, she did not treat Harley James’s feelings as fully real or lasting. The mismatch between his permanent tattoo and her expectation of a short relationship therefore made the prospect feel exciting without making her confront its consequences. She even reasoned that a stylized, anime-like image of her could pass as a generic character if they broke up. The eventual tattoo would overturn her assumption in a different way: he did not choose a disguised portrait of her at all.

The Trip to the Parlor

Harley James was working at an auto body shop about half an hour from his home, and, because he had no car, BB Easton often drove him back. Her pickups followed a furtive routine: she came home from school, picked at dinner, lied to her parents about where she was going, and hurried out again to take him home. The tattoo appointment transformed that familiar errand into a moment she expected to remember as a romantic milestone. When she contacted him to ask whether he needed a ride from work, he told her to collect him from the Terminus City tattoo parlor instead.

BB Easton raced there in BB’s Ford Mustang, giddy at the thought that the long-discussed tattoo was finally happening. Her entrance announced that excitement before she had even seen Harley James: she shoved the door open so forcefully that the small silver bell above it swung into the drop-tile ceiling and knocked loose a piece of plaster. It landed on the ripped red vinyl cushion of a cheap aluminum waiting-room chair while the person at the desk casually looked over. The comic damage to the shabby room contrasts with the grandeur of the scene BB Easton had imagined; she was entering as if for a celebration, while the parlor offered only a battered chair and a hole in the ceiling.

The Tattoo Reveal

The former tanning salon had a lobby narrowing into a long hallway lined with doors. Only one stood open, and the buzzing sound from inside drew BB Easton toward it. She found Harley James shirtless in a semi-reclined, dentist-like chair, calm while a large tattoo artist worked beside him with a buzzing needle. His stillness struck her as impressive, although she suspected he had taken a fistful of Vicodin and washed it down with Listerine. He greeted her with a slow smile and waited for a hug; she gave him a quick one before edging around the tattoo artist, whose body blocked her view of the work.

BB Easton struggled to keep her enthusiasm contained as she tried to see which of her sketches Harley James had selected. The reveal was Eeyore, the depressed donkey from Winnie-the-Pooh, with the little pink bow on his backside. The tattoo covered much of Harley James’s upper arm, occupying the very place where BB Easton had expected her own face to appear. Its scale and permanence made the substitution impossible to mistake for a small joke or a temporary design. As she put it in her diary, Eeyore had taken a bullet for her: the cartoon donkey stood between her and the permanence she had once imagined for herself.

Harley James did not understand her fury. He explained that people called him Eeyore because he spoke slowly, imitating the character’s way of talking. The explanation made the tattoo a self-portrait of sorts, rooted in his nickname rather than in the designs BB Easton had prepared. That distinction mattered: the weeks of drawings had led her to believe he was choosing among versions of her, while his final choice expressed how he saw himself. She glared at him as he smiled, apparently oblivious to the reversal taking place beside the tattoo chair.

Break and Aftermath

The discovery ended BB Easton’s willingness to continue the relationship. Her account marks the decision plainly: she was done. She did not describe a negotiated breakup or a final exchange; instead, she left the parlor in haste and did not know how Harley James got home that night. In the process, she put at least one more hole in the already crumbling ceiling. The scene thus begins with a ceiling tile dislodged by her eager arrival and ends with further damage as she rushes away, a physical echo of the excitement that has collapsed into anger.

The tattoo’s significance lies in the gap between the promised image and the one Harley James chose. BB Easton had treated the design process as proof that he valued her, while Harley James’s choice displaced her with a cartoon that represented his own nickname. The permanence she had romanticized became a source of rejection rather than reassurance. Eeyore remains on Harley James’s arm, but in BB Easton’s account the tattoo also marks the moment her expectation of being inscribed into his life gives way to departure.