Page 13 of Tattoo Heartist
Sure.
That was the story for now. But every cell in my body fucking disagreed.
I finished the outline and color in a tense twenty minutes.
“Come back in four to six weeks for the touch-up, and you should be all set,” I said, my voice clipped.
The man nodded, dropped a hefty tip on my desk, probably to make up for the sudden discomfort his questioning had brought, and left.
Ingrid had drifted off during the session. When I looked over, she was flipping through my personal sketchbook. The one nobody touched. The pages I only opened on the dark days.
She sensed me watching and glanced up. Color touched her cheeks.
“You drew all of these?” she asked.
“…I did.”
I expected her to recoil. My sketchbook was filled with twisted lines, coils of barbed wire, destruction, frenzied faces…
But instead she said, “They’re beautiful.”
I froze. “You… like them?” I asked, my voice dropping.
She nodded. “Do you give any a meaning behind them?”
“Any great artist should…” But I didn’t particularly think of myself as a good artist.
“Can I try one?” My brows pulled together. She immediately panicked. “I—I mean giving it a meaning. Not… getting one tattooed on me.”
Right, because a sweet thing like her couldn’t be possibly talking about getting one of my tattoos drawn on her delicate skin… The thought of my hands holding her jittery body still lingered longer than I wanted it to.
I swallowed. Her doe eyes waited for permission to dissect my soul.
“Go for it.”
Her gaze settled on the shattered clock. She took a breath, steadying herself.
“It doesn’t look like time broke it all at once,” she said quietly. “It cracked slowly. Little fractures at first… then bigger ones. Until the pieces left couldn’t hold anything together anymore.”
Her voice softened into something almost reverent.
“And the harder you try to fix it, the more the clock breaks, the longer you’re stuck in time. But the pieces still matter. You can’t put them back where they were, but… they’re still here… still yours.”
My heart hammered against my ribs. I felt exposed. Naked. Confused and angry all at once. Nobody had ever understood a damn thing about me and she’d just walked straight through the front door of my trauma.
It was too much.
I stood abruptly.
“We’re leaving soon,” I said, voice low and tight. “Get your things.”
Her expression cracked. Hurt flickered across her face.
“I-I didn’t mean to upset you…”
“You didn’t,” I said, quick and rough.
But I stepped back anyway, putting distance between us before she could look at me the way she looked at that drawing. Before she peeled me open again.
