Work Text:
Jace gets his first tattoo on the day he turns eighteen.
It’s something small, just the W of his old family crest etched along his side. He gave up the name Wayland for Lightwood years ago, but it feels too much like betrayal to completely forget about where he came from.
Jace lifts his shirt to show the tattoo artist where he wants the thing, right below his ribs on a patch of skin crossed with faded scars. The older man looks at him dubiously when he indicates the spot.
“Are you sure?” the dark haired man asks. “That’s going to hurt like a bitch. ”
Jace nods, his mouth set in a firm line. “I’m sure. It needs to hurt.”
The artist seems to understand, and something in the way he looks at Jace makes him feel like they’re kindred spirits.
“Okay,” the artist says. “Let’s do it.”
—
Jace’s first tattoo is still red and puffy when he gets his second tattoo.
He has spent hours staring at his ink in the mirror. It hurts to look at, but at the same time it makes him feel grateful for all that he has, for all he has left behind. Still, it feels too stark with only the lines of the W there, like he’s commemorated only part of his story.
That’s when he goes back to the shop and asks the tattoo artist to flip through the binders full of samples at the front of the shop. Derek –- that’s his name -- is surprised and pleased to see Jace in again.
“Looking for anything particular?” Derek asks conversationally.
“I’m thinking some kind of symbol, or a rune–something along those lines,” Jace says absently. “Something with the meaning of strength, resilience, or survival.”
He’s hunting specifically for solid black markings, but some of Derek’s more intricate samples are beautiful too. He stops and drinks them in everytime a particularly good looking tattoo comes to his attention.
Derek notices the ones he stops on. “You sure you don’t want something more like that kind of stuff? Just let me know what you want, I can sketch something out for you.”
Jace shakes his head quickly. “No, I’m just admiring. I’m an artist too, you know,” Jace says. “I’m going to school upstate in the fall. It’s just incredible, though, seeing what you can do with a person’s skin on the canvas.”
Derek smiles at that. “Thanks. There’s more to it than just being good at art, you know. You’ve really got to know people, be able to understand what they want. And what I think you want is something like this. It’s a rune of survival.”
Derek flips through and stops at a symbol, curved but with edges. Jace loves it. He gets it tattooed on his chest, by his heart.
—
Jace is hooked. There's something about the tattoos that gives him a feeling of perfect expression. He feels more like himself the more ink he sees on his skin in the mirror.
They start to crawl all over his body his body: climbing up his neck, curling around his arm, even stamping his forearm. Jace starts designing some of them himself. He starts really connecting with Derek as an artist, coming to the older man for critique on his designs. Sometimes he goes just to hang out. The summer after Freshman year, he comes into Derek's shop so often that Derek offers him an apprenticeship. Jace spends the summer designing tattoo art under Derek's supervision.
Some examples:
There’s one he gets after he comes out to his parents as bisexual, an infinity sign intersecting two circles, pressed into his his forearm. There's a snake on his left calf to represent his Hogwarts house.
He gets a matching one with Alec down on his hip—and when Izzy finds out, she demands they all go get a matching sibling one.
—
By the time he’s a junior in college, he has almost a dozen of them. He’s aware how they make him look—Maryse grills him, sometimes, about what he’s trying to do for a living with his tattoos and his art degree. Jace hasn’t really thought that far ahead.
Girls look at the tattoos and assume he’s a fuck boy—which, okay, is kind of true—but the only time he’s ever really cared what someone thinks about it is the first time he hears Simon call him a hot tattooed serial killer.
After they get together, Simon is the first person he tells the full stories of every tattoo. Even the Wayland family symbol. He recounts the story behind that first tattoo as Simon lies curled against him, tracing the lines of the W.
“That’s so like you, to commemorate something that awful,” Simon says. It’s gentle, but not pitying. “Promise me your next one’s going to be a happy one.”
Jace smiles and kisses Simon for that. “I promise,” he says.
—
The next tattoo he gets is another matching tattoo: a simple black line across his ring finger.