Page 2 of Ship Happens

“Thank you,” Owen replies bluntly. “I aim to impress.”

“Can you do a black band?” Owen watches him flex, pointing to a spot on his bicep.

“Like a fisting tattoo?” Owen asks almost playfully.

That gives the client reason to pause. “Huh?”

“Nothing.” Owen sighs, pushing away from the counter to grab the clipboard with the consent forms. “Fill this out, give me a few minutes to get a stencil ready.”

The large man looks so out of place in the hole-in-the-wall shop, especially when he sits on the leather loveseat, legs manspread as he reads over the clipboard.

“How thick do you want the band?” Owen asks.

“Uh . . .” He hesitates for longer than Owen would like. “Six inches?”

“You want . . . a six-inch-thick band . . . around your bicep? Done tonight?” Owen hopes his tone is enough to talk the guy out of it.

“Is that too thick?”

“I’ll print out a few options,” Owen assures him, not sparing the client another glance and instead going back to his workstation to ready a fresh pack of needles and switch out the battery in his machine.

“Here you go.” The client—Trevor, according to the name signed sloppily at the bottom—hands the consent form back to Owen when he reaches the front of the shop. Owen eyes the information, making sure everything has been signed and initialed where it needs to be.

“All right, feel free to sit down on the table. I’ll be back.”

When Owen returns, he goes through his usual routine of shaving Trevor’s arm hair before he marks the placement of the stencil, trying out a few different-sized versions on Trevor’s arm, adjusting and readjusting when the placement isn’t just right before he sets the primer gel and then the final attempt. Most clients might think a black band should be simple, but there’s a lot that goes into lining up the entire piece, making sure it looks good from every angle. And Trevor having biceps the size of Owen’s head certainly doesn’t make things any easier.

“Is this going to hurt?” Trevor asks, flinching when Owen’s latex gloves snap to his wrist.

“It’s a bunch of tiny needles going into your skin over and over again,” Owen says. “To make sure it’s filled, I’ll be going over the skin a few times. And you’ll probably need to come back in a few weeks when it’s fully healed to get it touched up.”

Owen’s not trying to freak the poor man out. But why lie?

“I have numbing cream,” he offers, but Trevor shakes his head. “All right, then,” Owen says. Scooting his wheeled stool closer to the massage table, he brings around the leather armrest, adjusting the height. “Stretch your arm out and keep it relaxed.”

Owen pulls Trevor’s skin taut as he finally sets needle to skin. He’s not sure how much time passes, really. It’s always been easy for Owen to get lost in the practiced action, making sure that he’s filling in the spots the best he can before moving on to a different area and letting the skin rest. By the time Trevor opens his mouth again, he’s managed to get a sizeable amount of the tattoo done.

“Yo, do you, uh . . . need to take a break or anything?” Trevor asks.

Owen cuts the power to the machine, blinking his dry eyes. “What was that?”

“Your back, ya know? You should take a minute.”

It’s easy to read through the lines. “Yeah, let’s take a break.” Owen does need to stretch, especially when he realizes that it’s already been forty-five minutes. He hadn’t even come to the shop with the intention of working. Kaitlyn and Abby started to get a little too handsy while watching Frosty the Snowman. So he’d packed up his dinner in Tupperware and hopped on the bus. Besides, it’s not like there wasn’t a ton to do.

Follow-up emails, appointment reminders, website and calendar updates, scheduling January’s staff meeting, his own ink and needle restock orders that he needed to get to the shop’s intern before the end of the year, and he had to do the same for Sarah since she’d left town before she got a chance to do her own inventory.

And Owen is nothing if not kind. Plus she promised hot pot.

Of course, Owen had forgone all of that to browse LoopNet instead, scrolling through pages and pages of commercial real estate listings in San Francisco. And when he wasn’t doing that, he was on Reddit, reading through dozens upon dozens of posts made by tattoo artists who’d opened their own shops.

Owen’s stomach stirs with a wicked mixture of anxiety fueled by terror and excitement as he opens his loan proposal on his laptop, his plan all perfectly laid out with Ravi’s help. He’s still months from it being ready, maybe years if things really go south.

But the plan is coming together. Bit by bit, piece by piece, Full Metal is turning into a reality.

“Yo, dude!” Trevor calls out just as Owen spoons a bite of his dinner into his mouth. “Do you think we could speed things up?”

“No.” Owen answers bluntly after swallowing, making Trevor wait as he chews. He goes back to his phone, checking a few notifications on his Instagram before he makes a note for himself to post the flash sheet he finished last week and reply to DMs so he can try and fill out his books through the first half of the year, really pad his savings.