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1: OLDTOWN 4EVER
“I have a feeling that this wasn’t done with marker.”
Juno groans after attempting to raise his head to look at the source of the voice. Unfortunately his head swims far too much to move it in any significant capacity, so instead the young girl cracks one eye open and tries to get a good look.
The voice belongs to Sasha Wire, who is perched up on the bathroom counter and regarding herself in the mirror. Juno can see her through the open door, even while currently face-planted in the middle of the living room.
“Whaddaya mean?” He slurs out, cheek pressed to the carpet.
“The tattoo, Juno!” She grabs the doorframe, looking like a wild animal. “The tattoo peeking out from your ass right now!”
“Why were y’lookin’ at my ass?”
“And what’s worse, is that it’s right on top of mine, too!” She turns around and points to the lower end of her spine. “Look!”
Sure enough, there sits a collection of crooked and lopsided letters that Juno couldn’t decipher even if he were sober right now. Maybe she could pass it off as abstract art, he thinks.
As if on cue, Mick Mercury rounds the corner into the room with an armful of pillows.
“Oh hey, look at that, you’re awake!” His voice is far too loud for all the assembled hungover teens in the room right now.
“Geez, Mercury. Keep it down, wouldya?” Juno croaks, wishing desperately for the noise level in the room to quiet down again.
Sasha makes sure that doesn’t happen by shrieking, “Mick! You didn’t drink, right? Who the hell tattooed us?”
“Oh, the snazzy art you guys are both adorned with now? Why, yours truly!” He beams with pride. “Just like you asked me to!”
Juno pushes himself up onto his elbows and stares directly at the gangly teenager standing in front of him. The boy in question smiles from ear to ear, seconds before a pillow hits him straight in the face courtesy of one absolutely furious looking Sasha.
“You’re paying for the laser-removal, Mercury!”
///
The tattoo artist lets out a hearty laugh when Juno pulls up his shirt.
“You sure you wanna cover this one up, man?” Xe looks genuinely delighted.
“Are you saying you would wanna run around with a tattoo like that?”
“Hell yeah I would!”
“Bullshit.”
“Nah man, tramp stamps are my favorite. I love ‘em!”
Xe flips through xer flashbook with a chuckle. “Stamping people is my thing. Nothing tells a story quite like a tramp stamp.”
Juno drops the hem of his sweater to cover the strange lettering back up again.
“I mean, if you wanna trade, I can take a spin on that tattoo thingie of yours and give you a matching one.” He sits down with a huff. “It’d be my first time using anything like that, but I’d wager a guess it would turn out looking just like mine does.”
Xe chuckles and presents him with the book. “Take your pick, Oldtownie. What kind of vibe are we going for?”
2: Del’s Babe
“You look hot, babe.”
He’s tracing over the knuckles of his left hand, careful to avoid the raw welts that adorn Juno’s fingers.
Juno knows he looks hot. He feels like it, here in the dim purple light of the night club, with his head throbbing and his muscles buzzing. Additionally, the music blasting through the speakers above is muffled through the haze of whatever pills his partner had organized for him to snack on tonight.
Juno is better off not hearing his own thoughts right now.
“Thanks,” he breathes out over the rim of his cup. His lips are painted with an iridescent shimmer, leaving glitter in every sip he takes.
“What d’you think should go on the other hand?”
The man sitting with him at the bar is Del, the newest addition to a long line of men who have promised to “treat Juno right,” when interrogated by Rita.
Her judgment is, as usual, more of a suggestion to Juno than anything concrete.
She’s paranoid of every person that crosses the threshold into his apartment. Based purely on statistics, she can’t be right about all of them.
And besides, Del is tall, handsome, and well-manicured, with a subtle rumble to his speech. Words from him sound like the warm engine of an old car that has been lovingly maintained for decades. There is no voice he can imagine being more comforting for him after a bad trip. And Del’s been there to pick him up after many of those, lately.
“Lemme think about it.” He leans closer to Juno, slipping his hand lower to hold him at the waist instead. It makes Juno’s heart cry out with the desire to be touched exactly like this, forever.
It’s difficult to admit that all he wants sometimes is a pair of warm hands to hold him gently. And some desperate part of him wants to be the only one who gets that treatment from said pair of hands.
Though that may be asking for a little too much reciprocation from his current partner.
”How about putting my name on this one, hm?” He traces the knuckles of Juno’s right hand, now. “That way it’d spell out Del’s Babe.”
A giggle escapes Juno’s mouth before he can stop himself.
“Del’s Babe?” He snorts. “What, like I’m your bitch?”
“Sure,” Del grins. His face is cut into stark shadows when a club headlight cuts past them. “I wouldn’t mind displaying you like a prize, pretty girl.”
He breathes out with a shudder. “What about you? Would you get my name inked too, real couple-like, and all?”
///
“Oh. Yikes.”
Juno grimaces. The tattoo removal technician clearly hadn’t meant to let that slip, as is evident by the apologetic look she gives him immediately afterward.
“Yeah, I’ve heard that one before,” he shrugs. “I tend to think that same thing myself when I look at it. Hence why I’m here.”
She perks up. “Well, don’t you worry, Mr. Steel. We should be able to get this one removed without problem! Small letters without a whole lot of shading don’t generally prove to be a nuisance. I guess we all make some mistakes without keeping in mind how difficult getting rid of them in the future will be, huh?”
She smiles at him while setting up her machine. The idea that lasers can remove ink from inside his skin is far too complicated for Juno to understand. He barely knows how a toaster works, and looking at all the safety pamphlets on the table makes him think that, even with a doctorate, he’d still be hard-pressed to understand it.
“Now, I gotta warn you. Laser tattoo removal is painful on the best of days, and the hands are a pretty brutal spot to do it on.”
“Nothing I haven’t dealt with before, doc.”
3: Queen of hearts
Peter Nureyev’s hands are shaking.
His fingers are as gentle as they can be, considering the duress his entire nervous system has been put through in the past few days. In spite of that, he traces over the lines on Juno’s thigh with a reverence that is difficult for the delirious detective to comprehend.
“The queen of hearts,” the thief starts to say before interrupting himself to swallow, in an attempt to bring moisture to his dry mouth.
The detective doesn’t remember why he chose that card specifically. Right now he doesn’t remember much at all, as a matter of fact. His head is too clouded by the opioids the hospital staff had administered him.
He can’t blame them for giving them to him, but he wishes he’d been conscious enough to ask them for an alternative.
That’s besides the point though. Juno needs to stop thinking about playing cards, and fast.
“I didn’t know you had more tattoos than just the one. Though, well… Seeing all of them like this is quite the treat, I must say.”
Juno acknowledges him by humming in a low tone, nuzzling his face into the nape of Nureyev’s neck. The pressure it puts on his bandaged eye is a hellish torment, but the pain is blinding enough to send him to a different plane of conscience entirely.
That’s where he wants to be right now. Far away.
Someplace where he doesn’t have to face what comes tomorrow. Someplace where he doesn’t have to do it alone.
“I quite like the, ah…” The beautiful man tangled in the sheets next to him yawns. “I adore the red ink, here.”
He traces the little hearts adorning the corners of the playing card.
They are both alive.
He wants to kiss every single piece of art adorning Juno’s skin.
Perhaps then he can make him see that he is just as beautiful.
///
“And did you have an idea for what you’d like the cover-up to look like?”
The artist sitting across from him on the plush black seat gives Juno a kind, patient smile. They’re twirling a screen pen in their hand, with a practiced ease that reeks of a nervous habit.
“Yeah, uh…” Juno shifts in his seat. The glass eye in his socket still feels like an alien object intruding on his skull. Maybe because he hadn't bothered to get a proper fitting for it. He can feel it in his spine when that awful object moves, making him squirm with the abject desire to get it out of him.
“I can also throw out some ideas if that’d be easier for you, miss.”
There’s that understanding tone again.
“We can work with the card shape and cover up the face by adding—”
“The card’s what has to go,” He interrupts them, blurting out the words before he can think of a better way to phrase them.
“Oh, I see. Okay then.” The tattoo artist writes something on their screen, the faint tapping of their pen filling the air between the two of them.
“And can we keep the face?"
“Sure.”
“Alright, awesome. In that case, I’m thinking we start out with this moon behind her. Eclipsing her, almost, and circling outwards until it meets the corners of the card, at which point we can do a swirling fog around it and…”
1: Benzaiten
The first session for this tattoo was years ago.
He had just been freshly accepted into the police academy, and by the looks of it, they might even finance an education for him if he really decides to go for it. A degree in criminology or criminal psychology could get him farther than he had ever expected to get, farther than anyone had expected him to get.
Well, except Ben. Ben always believed in him.
The idea of having control over his own life after so long had terrified Juno to his very core. But it excited him, too. There was some real, tangible hope there in the miserable dark pit of his life.
Juno swishes the last remaining sip of sparkling water around the bottom of the bottle. It makes a gentle sound, something his ears register far later than the sound actually happens.
He’s twenty-eight, and it’s been ten years since the large piece spanning his shoulder and bicep was first started.
For years, Juno had attempted to schedule follow-up appointments with various different studios. A vast majority, of course, had been ecstatic to take him. Some of the older artists even knew him already, and had expressly told him they’d be thrilled to ink him again.
Juno does make quite the storyteller when he has silence to fill.
But of course he had canceled on all of them, and usually on short notice.
What point was there for him to attempt finishing a piece dedicated to someone whose life was unfinished, too?
For a while, Juno had considered getting it covered up with something different entirely. The basic structure of the piece was the only thing they’d gotten done in that first session, anyway. Some blocky shapes and lines that have long since faded into slightly wonky blobs.
You wouldn’t know what it was supposed to look like, even if you knew the sentiment behind it.
The lady gets up off the couch and checks his watch, something old-fashioned that Rita had gotten for him a couple months ago. She knows he prefers reading the time without having to be connected to the Wi-Fi for it.
It’s about time for him to make his way down to the studio. He’d told himself that today is the day.
Well, he’d told himself that today is the day several months ago, but he had to wait for a slot to open up. That is, of course, just how it goes.
Juno has been sober for a year and four months.
He told himself that making it a whole year is what it’d take for him to be allowed to finish the piece. And now he’s really doing it.
Well, he supposes he can still turn around and go back home. The blankets and old bed frame in his room would gladly accept the lady back, without even one question asked.
But before he knows it, the tattoo artist is printing out the stencil of the design they'd custom made for Juno.
And before he knows it, he's telling them all about his inspirations.
Well, inspiration. Just the one.
"We were both named after these… Old Earth goddesses." Juno looks up at the ceiling and swallows a lump in his throat.
"Benzaiten and Juno."
"Music and motherhood, right?" His artist keeps their gaze on his arm, which he appreciates.
He hums in affirmation and closes his eyes to focus on the pain of the tattoo gun.
"Okay, I kinda cheated my guess there. The lute gave it away."
In the end, the piece takes three sessions to finish.
The glow around the head of the goddess is done in white ink, as are the tears trickling down her face.
But she's smiling.
She looks at peace, there on Juno's shoulder. Dressed in fine fabrics and ballet shoes, holding her instrument.
Juno sometimes still thinks about what his artist had told him on his way out of the studio that day.
"Nothing can bring family back once they're gone," they had said with this smile full of something he couldn't define at the time.
"But wherever he is now, man… I think he can feel your love for him even all the way out there."