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Declan Lynch did not want a tattoo.
More precisely, Declan Lynch had negative interest in getting a tattoo. That was his personal preference, if you were to ask him, and had nothing to do with the hollow space that occupied all his background thoughts about it — full of the broken look Ronan had sported as the grief-induced tattoo on his back grew wider and blacker in the weeks after Father’s death.
Declan Lynch did not want a tattoo, but he was still going to get one, thank you very much.
Everything started three months ago, with Declan wandering into a showcase catered by the local Faculty of Visual Arts. That, too, was outside the realms of his interests — the real and most hidden ones that filled his attic with canvases for his eyes only and his wallet with memberships to his favourite museums. The writing on the poster, proudly proclaiming an open evening full of diverse styles and diverse crowds and diverse interests, had done nothing to catch his attention. Something in the design of the background of the poster — the hue and the intertwining colours of it — did.
It had been silly and impossible to rationalise, and Declan had gone nonetheless.
He had regretted almost immediately while walking past three wannabe-design chairs for which Mies van der Rohe would have asked royalties, but had decided to stick to it a bit longer, lured by the shininess of an installation with metal and lights.
That was where he had found her — in the line of sight with one of the arches of the composition, with mutable shadows cast over her figure. For an embarrassing second, Declan had wondered if she, too, was part of the art piece, a performance in dark skin, shiny leather and bright accessories. Then he had gotten closer, enough to finally notice the sketches and canvases and prints around her, and realised she was one of the participants.
The way her body curved in her slouch on the chair — and even more so the precarious leverage of the heel of her boots at the corner of the table — made Declan think of Ronan. The length of her neck and the coloured flowers inked thinly on her dark skin, all the way to the line of her clavicles, made Declan think of something else entirely.
Before he could think of something clever to say — or at the very least appropriate — her deep dark eyes had already glued on him with half humorous intent.
“You’re making some people nervous, wandering around like that,” she had said, not moving from her slouch not even as Declan approached her and her display.
“I really fail to see how.”
Her smirk had only deepened — unhelpful, because the curve of her lips was already mesmerising to begin with. “I think it’s the suit, and that skeptical raise of an eyebrow that you do every once in a while.” She had proceeded to demonstrate it with such an uncanny precision Declan had to make a conscious effort of smoothening his forehead. “They think you’re from the finance department, or something like that.”
“They,” Declan had repeated, while taking note of the fact that holding the jacket of his suit under his arm did not help with providing in an air of informality. “And what do you think, instead?”
“I think that you’re frowning at the art, not at the money behind it,” she had provided, finally unfurling from her slouch as Declan stood in front of her display. “I think that no one from the finance department would ever wear shoes like that.”
If the first statement had been catching, the second one had pinned Declan into place — and made him slowly look down at his own feet — like a butterfly on a display. “What’s wrong with my shoes?”
“Nothing’s wrong with your shoes,” she had stressed, making Declan desperately wish it was a compliment. “Is that where you keep your personality?”
Maybe she did, indeed, have, something similar to Ronan, but at least Declan had known what to disregard in the taunting to keep the conversation going. Because he had wanted the conversation to keep going, to stay the focus of her attention in the intercrossing web of light and shadows of the installation beside him.
“I’m here for the art,” Declan had confirmed.
“And you liked the installation,” she had added, tilting her chin to point behind Declan’s shoulders.
Declan had been on the verge of replying when one of the prints arranged in a quirky ellipse close to his toes caught his attention for good. “The poster…”
“Which one?” she had cued in, with a little wave of her hand, as if to say that everything around her might or might not be a poster.
“The one for the exhibition,” Declan had clarified, looking her right in the eyes again. “The background is one of your works, isn’t it?”
The intrigue in her dark eyes, surrounded by the artificially elongated shadows of her eyelashes, had been as good as an answer. “How can you be sure about it? Maybe it was a copy of something, and everything you see here is yet another copy.”
It could have been, but there had been something in the swirl of ink on the prints, and photographs and sketches around them that screamed at Declan. “Something about the colour blurs,” he had resolved to say, after a long pause that had filled the air between them with the buzzing of the conversation around them — a testament of the fact that the world still existed beyond this girl and her art. “Maybe that’s where you keep your personality?”
At this, she had blinked, and then laughed so loud that some of the other visitors had stopped talking to turn around and look at them.
“And here I was, almost fooled into thinking you were boring,” she had mused, after catching a breath, and that had been a compliment for sure — a certainty that had left Declan ambivalent, since boring was always easier to uphold and to manage than interesting.
In the slippery hours between that moment and the closing time of the exhibition, they had walked around the exhibition together — an experience certainly more appealing than the starting attempt that had brought Declan to her display in the first place. They shared the same opinion on Mondrian, but were on different ends of the spectrum of enjoyment of white wine. She had little stories about a lot of the artists that Declan could spot across the room, but she had been more than willing to listen to Declan’s historical trivia on painters and sculptures — treasured and repackaged as stories in their own right.
Her name was Jordan Hennessy, but her business card just recited Hennessy - Tattoo artist. Declan had only got around the Jordan bit halfway through a late night dinner in a family diner nearby, the exhibition long closed and almost long forgotten. At first, she had been just Hennessy.
Jordan had refused any attempt to bargain for one of her prints, or her sketches, though Declan had come up with a list of priority of favourites in the time it had taken her to show him the display.
“I never feel like this is real living art, it would be like selling you a doodle sketch made on the phone,” she had insisted, as he walked her back to her motorcycle. “I’m a tattoo artist because my art is meant to live on a person, Declan.”
Declan Lynch did not want a tattoo. But he wanted Jordan’s art, and the feeling was so visceral that he would let her ink his body rather than trying to unpack it.
It had taken him a month and a half — and a trip with her at his favourite coffee shop — to get an appointment.
The Forgery was not dissimilar to the way any tattoo studio looked like, or so Declan assumed, but whatever reticence he might have harboured over every picture of a stranger with ink on their body faded in recognising Jordan’s designs on some of these strangers. If they could have it, then Declan needed it.
“I wouldn’t like it somewhere very visible,” Declan told Jordan, while sitting in her office — so different from anything he would call an office, with a separate side full of tattooing equipment that made him queasy in the stomach more than the coffee he had to refuse would have done.
“Why, it doesn’t go with the suit?” Jordan mused, which was a good expression on her and gave Declan a more acceptable hyperfixation than the way her purple top matched the flowers on her neck.
She looked good in purple.
“It doesn’t go with a suit and it doesn’t go with my boss,” Declan confirmed, though that only made Jordan scoff.
“Do you really want to go with your boss?”
Declan did not, but also he was good at his job, his comfortably flat job — a bit more of a stretched over internship if he had to be frank with himself — so he said nothing.
“What about your back, then?” Jordan went on with the proposals, as if no silence ever happened.
Ronan had been a different type of brother with tousled hair and a clear back — a nice physical match to Declan with a personality that pleased their father more. Shaved head and deep black twists of ink had snatched him away. Declan did not want to feel so at loss, so mournful over the concept — but he did.
“Not my back.”
It must have come out too crass, detached in a way that Jordan had done nothing to deserve. Instead of reproach, it won him a sharp look of dark eyes read to pin him in place.
“Sorry, it’s just…”
“Not your back,” Jordan echoed him, almost with ease. It was relieving and it wasn’t.
She slid away from her armchair, her movement smooth and deceitfully innocuous even as she stopped right in front of Declan. She was tall and with a compact body and Declan could almost sense the tautness of her abs from having them in line of sight. His throat went ridiculously dry from one second to the other.
Her hand reached close, skirting over the fabric of his shirt right above the waist of his trousers. Even as it happened, the gesture had the syrupy quality of a dream.
“What about your side?” she proposed, seemingly unaffected by Declan’s stillness, or his looking up at her while being so close.
“My side…?” he repeated, inadvertedly dumb. At least that made her smirk.
Years of prayers on the pawns of St Agnes’ church must have granted Declan more than he had ever bargained for, because her fingers curled and the fabric of his shirt slowly followed. It slid off with minimal resistance, suddenly more lax after it passed the tension of his belt.
Jordan’s hand slid underneath, smooth and dry and right on his skin.
She was so casual about it, almost analytical, that Declan wished he could un-jump his stomach. He breathed in and out just to dispel any impression of it. His silence must have been somehow telling, though, because Jordan smirked again, and there was another brush of her fingers.
“We could put the tattoo on your side...right here, since you’re not ticklish.”
Right here was above his hip bone on his left side. Usually covered by clothes, not so evident even in improbable pool parties or other instances of partial nudity. But anything that came close to the thought of nudity set Declan’s brain ablaze about the reality of touch.
“Yes,” he blurted out, before he could think better of it — before he could think at all.
“Brilliant” Jordan drawled, sounding more markedly British in something that felt like satisfaction — or maybe just mischief.
She drove back as if she never got this close to begin with, as though she had never stroked Declan’s skin to fill his insides with want.
He wanted her back but he would never ask, especially not as she started commenting on possible designs.
One did not interrupt an artist speaking of their favourite art.
He listened to her then, and then he listened to her some more as they queued at Declan’s favourite coffee shop, but she also listened to him, yet another time, while being incredibly picky with her special fried rice order.
The design came to life as if Jordan had conjured it out of her dreams.
She presented it to him on a piece of paper, inked and refined even as the surface showed signs of pencil marks being drawn and erased and redrawn.
Declan was fresh out of work, where fresh was an hilariously inappropriate word because he, too, felt stretched thin and erased and blurred — pulled in too many different directions by the necessities of fitting incompatible masks, all to the same equal level of commitment. He hadn’t been ready for this, but Jordan had been perched on a rail at the side of the rode, and of course he had gone towards her and followed to the park because where else would he go?
He wasn’t ready for the design — for the beginning of the end of their transaction, maybe — but he took the paper nonetheless.
The park was full of people, in the rush hour that followed the emptying of the offices and schools, and there was a debatable open air performance of a quartet going on nearby. Each perception was invasive and yet everything faded as Declan took in Jordan’s creation — Jordan’s idea of what Declan should have marked on his skin, to stay there forever.
It was akin to a tree trunk cracked open to reveal a surreal pattern of wood grains, or to sunlight catching a pool of clear water with seaweed dancing with the raft. It was abstract and it wasn’t, in the same way the nebulous fascination Declan had harboured for the design of the poster had since materialised into something not quite tangible.
“I…” he started, and failed to finish.
“You don’t like it? If you explain it to me we can fix it together,” Jordan offered, proactively — professionally, maybe, which was never quite what Declan was angling for but possibly all he could get.
“No, I like it.” The admission was weirdly hard. He liked it, he would be content of just being able to keep it, but he also knew Jordan’s piece would not be complete until it got transferred to his skin. “I like it, we should go forward with this.”
The anxiety that twisted inside him had been worth being back to her studio — ten days and an impromptu smoothie on Saturday morning later — because the studio seemed like the place where Jordan was the truest version of herself.
Worthy did not, of course, exclude disconcerting, especially when Jordan casually walked behind him and ran the sharp end of her nails along the crease of Declan’s shirt at his back. He stilled so suddenly at the gesture he almost felt the need to justify it, but she did not question him — she just curled her fingers and pulled the fabric out of his trousers, once again.
Declan was almost unsure whether he was imagining it — a warm and forbidden fantasy — or she was truly teasing him like this, in a reprise of something not quite familiar but surely already seen.
“Why don’t you take your shirt off, Lynch?” she suggested, with a tone that had enough banter in it to be fitting with reality. “I’m going to do a mock-up of the design on you so we can use it as the final idea, before we take an appointment for the ink.”
Skittishness did not belong to Declan, both in his nature and in the nurture of growing up as the eldest of three sons, and yet the feeling of self-consciousness pricked along his nape as he laid on the fully reclined tattoo bed, with the net feeling of Jordan’s dark eyes skirting over his form. Analytical and pragmatic, but maybe not only, just as her touch on his arm was clinical — with nitrile gloves on, even — but not really aseptic as she made sure to angle him in a steady but straightforward position.
Just for the drawing, of course.
There was a subdued background of music in a seemingly never ending loop, always different but consistent in the low basses and quiet pace. Silence was never awkward with Jordan, and Declan appreciated not having to keep up a stream of pleasant conversational nonsense when out of work — but there was something about the gentle pressure of her fingers on his side, keeping him steady, that made Declan want to talk just to fill the air. It was probably just nerves.
“It’s good,” Jordan murmured, unaffected in her concentration, “that you’re not ticklish.”
The path of her thin-pointed pen hadn’t been that noticeable, but of course the moment she pointed it out Declan’s mind hyperfixated on it.
He snorted, trying hard not to squirm. Jordan was smiling like a fox.
“You did that on purpose,” Declan protested, while taking in a deep breath to calm himself down.
“Me? Never.” But she was still smirking and she kept at it even as they fell silent again, for the mock drawing to continue.
It was easier after that, just a bit, though Declan hoped no one would fault him for the way his eyes kept going back to the little frown of concentration on her forehead.
He had always been curious to understand the thought process being an art piece, fitting together trivia of the artist’s life to figure out how they ended up with a style. The thought of how the canvas would feel, under all that attention, had never crossed his mind. At least never before.
Put in this light, the fact that most people talked about their tattoos as their personal experience was puzzling.
Declan could put away his disdain, his controversy, for the unique experience of being the art of an artist.
Nevertheless, he was still sure he would not like a drawing on his skin — not even Jordan’s drawing — but there would be no need to go through that conversation. He could just school his expression enough and be as genuinely appreciative as he felt. Following the train of this thought, he slowly got up from the recliner, only a vague dizziness to accompany the sudden freedom.
The mirror was waiting for him and he was ready for the mirror.
Except he wasn’t, because the first impression was the unmistakable trait of Jordan’s style right on his skin, in that unique design she had made for him specifically. The second realisation was that the drawing was green.
“The draft was just a clean drawing, but this is how I envisioned it for you,” Jordan was already saying, maybe catching on Declan’s stillness. “I know you wouldn’t like it black.”
As he had listened to her, Jordan had been listening to him.
The queasy feeling pooling down Declan’s stomach was unspeakable and ambivalent — dense with euphoria and twisted in the preemptive grief of a possible end to all of this.
Would the tattoo ease the fact that they wouldn’t keep going like this?
One session was enough to ink it into his skin — a modest design, tactically placed, just as Declan had wished for — and it was fitting that it hurt.
Jordan had come for sushi with him a week before but the whole ritual they had orchestrated around each other revolved on the tattoo, on getting it ready, refining it, getting it done. It was a business transaction and Declan would more than gladly pay for it, even as he reminded himself that men confusing friendly professionality with a suggestion of flirting were pathetic.
Deluding himself just a little while longer was an easy task, made even easier from the causal banter that Jordan always dedicated to him.
“You could have told me before that needles make you squeamish.”
“I’m not squeamish, I’m also staying perfectly still.”
“You are indeed, and you don’t seem like the type to get squeamish so I let myself get fooled.” Jordan shook her head as if Declan had played a particularly clever poker hand. “But you could have told me.”
Declan huffed deeply, and gave up trying to deflect. “I’m not usually, and it’s not really that heavy. It just feels a bit weirder than I had expected.”
“And it hurts.”
“Yeah, that too.”
It was so incredibly easy to delude himself, as Jordan put down the equipment and took off her gloves, only to reach over Declan’s head and comb the hair out of his sweaty forehead.
“Let’s take a little break,” she said, and Declan nodded numbly.
After all, he did not want this to end so quickly.
And yet it did, as the afternoon turned into an early evening.
Declan footed the bill with an automatic extra 20% without even looking at the actual numbers, as Jordan gave him some general healing and care suggestions. He was already creamed up and wrapped in plastic, and it would feel weirder if Declan hadn’t already maxed out on weird.
A dull pain radiated from his side, heating up his skin even more under the wrap.
He had wanted to say something clever, to call this a day, and yet he could not discern what pleasantry — what mask — must have taken the autopilot to part from Jordan. Maybe it would be better to have it nondescript, after all. Nothing to be remembered, in favour of remembering anything that came before it.
“We’re without a schedule now, but don’t be a stranger, okay?”
“Of course,” Declan heard himself saying. “I might even catch you in a better exhibition.”
The ring of it all was distressingly similar to the interactions Ronan usually subjected him to when he was not being aggressive — back and forth with no underlying grounds to stand on, because Ronan would not pick up the phone if called even though he would still meet Declan at mass. It was Declan’s clue to get.
He left the shop from the backdoor, a convenient route for all the customers to avoid constant crossing over with the waiting room at the front.
Outside, the sun was half clouded and its light was softening towards the hue of a late afternoon, the noise of the adjacent main street shielded by the buildings. The air was fresh on Declan’s face, equally sobering and insufficient given how his all chest felt too hot and pierced with ice at the same time.
The moment of dread was mostly in Declan’s head, that much he knew — his father had taught him, sometimes purposefully, how his habit of getting worked up in the options and the perspective would only end up in disappointment, because reality would never win the match.
“Hey, Declan!”
Jordan’s voice cracked through his train of thought with a weird timing. He turned around to look at her, stalking up towards him from the backdoor of the tattoo shop. She always walked with confidence but there was something positively stalking in her steps now.
“Yes?” He tried, aiming for casual. “Did I forget something?”
He could do casual, and then resurface in a couple of weeks with a ticket for an art exhibition, without crushing any pride he ever had. He could be smooth.
Or he thought he could, even though Jordan was looking at him — through him — as if now that she had inked him she could have rights to Declan’s carefully guarded brain.
“Maybe,” Jordan replied, cryptically. “I’ve got just one question.”
Questions weren’t necessarily a good sign, Declan’s shoulders were already tensing in defensiveness. “Sure, go ahead.”
“How is it that I spent the last weeks going on dates with you and stripping you in increments, and you tuck your tail and run?”
It was not real and too real, a surprise and exactly what Declan wanted to hear.
He could be smooth, he really could, but the words caught deep in his throat and at the end Declan just moved.
Crowded against the alley wall, Jordan still had her chin up and a defiant, slightly taunting look, never leaving Declan’s eyes — daring.
When he bent down to kiss her, her lips were more yielding than anything else about her seemed to suggest. She kissed him wet and open, with an aftertaste of the grapefruit water Declan had seen her drinking as she tattooed him. She kissed him, and Declan felt it under his skin more than any needle.
“So…” she breathed right against his mouth, biting down on Declan’s lower lip. “You liked the design?”
The sky was not so dull after all and Declan’s side burned as deliciously as his heart in his ribcage.
Jordan’s left hand combed right through his hair and Declan countered its path, bending down more firmly to kiss her again.
“God, yes.”