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“Hey, Babe. Come. Look.” I turn and wait with my hand out.
Bobby steps away from the young guy and takes me in his arms until his chin rests on top of my head. He studies the wall in silence for a long minute. “What am I looking at?”
“There.” I point to the picture on the wall.
I look up in time to watch his eyes narrow, then his powerful hand snaps out and tears the image from the wall. “They got pictures of my girl up in here?” His nostrils flare and his jaw ticks, but I simply smile. That image doesn’t show my face, just the ink, but he recognizes me in an instant.
“Yeah. It’s cool, right?”
“Cool? No, but itisa half-naked photo of my future wife.”
I scoff. “Don’t freak. It’s the boring half, anyway.” I stand on my tiptoes and press a kiss to his jaw. “Luckily for you, I didn’t tattoo my ass.”
He scowls. “Lucky foryou, you didn’t tattoo your ass.” He leans in and bites my neck not-so-gently. “You drop your pants in here, you show your ass to anyone other than me, you’ll be in big trouble.”
“Oh yeah?” I whisper into his ear. “Will you spank me?”
Bullseye.
His eyes narrow, his pupils dilate. His hand squeezes me tighter until I have to bite back a moan at his display of‘I’m the alpha around here. Don’t fuck with me.’“Do you want me to spank you, baby?”
Ian steps around the corner with a smirk and a teardrop tattoo on his face. “Hey, guys. Good to see you both.”
I stumble back from Bobby’s arms, and burn a fiery red at being caught talking dirty, but in a heartbeat, Bobby spins us so his chest presses to my back… or more accurately, his hardened dick presses to my ass, and he uses me to hide it from our tattooist.
I blush, a lot. I can’t help it. I want to place my hands over my steaming face and walk away.
Bobby leans past me with a laugh and takes Ian’s hand in his. “Hey. How’s it going, man?”
Ian watches us with twinkling eyes that say he knows what’s going on. Heknows!“I’m good. I’ve been working on your stuff today, so I think we’re all set.” He looks to the image clutched in Bobby’s meaty hand. “You found your picture? Looks good, right?”
“Yeah, about that,” Bobby rumbles. He shoves the now wrinkled picture into his back pocket. “I’ll be keeping this. No more pictures of my girl on your walls, Ian.”
I laugh and step out of Bobby’s reach. He can show his raging boner off to the other guys. It’s not my problem. It might teach him a lesson about being a caveman. “Let’s get started. We’re running late.” I follow Ian around the front desk and past the partition that leads to the other eighty-percent of the shop.
Professional chairs and tables sit in each alcove. Desks with drawings line each space, and young artists sit at each desk or chair and ink their current clients.
We stop in the back corner, and with a smile, Ian thrusts a sheet of paper toward me like a little kid showing his mom a shitty rainbow. But Ian’s drawing isn’t shit. It’s amazing.
After a million emails, sketches, revisions, and internet sourced images for inspiration, this is his final result.
Daisies and roses intertwine in a lush garden of Eden, and in the branches sits a Peter Pan silhouette with his hand held above his eyes as though he’s looking into the distance.
Like he’s looking over me.
Several of the flower stems are actually words, and they all speak of love, and dreaming, and grief, and the fact he’s never truly gone for as long as he’s remembered.
Ian sits at his desk and flicks his pen against the wood in a nervous beat. “So… Do you like it?”
I nod and stare at the drawing. He took my jumbled descriptions and the ‘maybe we should do this’ and the ‘can we squeeze these here’ and the ‘I don’t know what I want. It’s too hard to decide’, and he turned it into exactly what I couldn’t verbalize. “It’s perfect.” I look up and meet his eyes. “It’s exactly what I was imagining.”
Bobby steps up behind me and looks over my shoulder. I’ve tried to explain what I want a million times, but I could never quite articulate the detail. Ian did it perfectly. “That looks really good, babe.”
“Okay.” Ian tosses his pen back to the desk in relief. “Where do you want it? Last we spoke, you hadn’t decided.”
This is true. I’ve been so indecisive about this whole deal, I haven’t even decided on location. I’ve been jumping back and forth between having it done on my thigh, or on my bad shoulder so it would weave into my existing tree and hide some of my scars.
I’m leaning toward the shoulder, as a kind of cover up – or maybe it could be better described as an allegorical ‘fuck you’ to those who hurt me. It’s a good vantage point for Pan to look out and keep me safe.
