Work Text:
Reeds did not, nor had they ever, had tattoos. Chalk it up to propriety, tradition, or some mix of cultural mores plus those two, but there was nothing but hard won scars to mar a Reed’s skin. Malcolm hadn’t ever had any interest in them either outside of acknowledging that they were an art form on their own. The thought of letting someone stab him repeatedly with a needle just didn’t interest him regardless of what value there was to be found. And after he’d become an operative with the Section, that wasn’t an option.
Malcolm laid on the table watching the play of the temporary violet ink over his ribs as he breathed. The selkie had his pelt wrapped around him, sharp seal teeth bared, wide eyes blown out like glass, and his chest moved with every breath Malcolm took. For some reason, the ink felt heavier than the skin it sat on even before the gun had sunk it deep where it couldn’t be taken out.
“You like?” The Orion asked, hands almost as big as Malcolm’s entire ribcage wrapped delicately around the gun with pots of ink scattered about his table.
The entire parlor smelled like alcohol, color, and the station’s exhaust.
“Yes.”
From what he understood, the ribs were meant to be one of the more painful places to get tattooed. It wasn’t pleasant, but much like a number of things he found unpleasant, it became a background white noise to what he was focused on, which was how the selkie took on a life of his own with every stroke of the needle, every bit of new ink punched into Malcolm’s skin. Almost like, if he’d felt like being fanciful, the creature was coming to life on his bones, fur made to look like it was glittering with ice crystals in careful dots of white-blue ink. The pelt itself was harbor seal grey with freckled splots of black scattered randomly amongst the icy sheen over his fur. His eyes, once they were colored in, were brown-black, only the barest hint of white at the edges of them, at once enraptured and raging at what he’d seen in the sky the Orion reflected in them.
When it was all done, he looked at the blend of blue-grey-white-brown-black splashed across the right side of his ribcage from just below his pec to just above the floating ribs. His skin was red around it, so inflamed he could’ve counted his pores where the selkie sat. It wouldn’t have been enough to keep Harris from getting to him, seeing as it was somewhere that could fairly easily be covered, but something audibly cracked as he stared into its eyes in the mirror and watched it breath with him. Truth be told, he couldn’t find it in himself to worry what that thing might’ve been at the look in the selkie’s eyes.
///
It became a presence, the selkie on his ribs, like he breathed with him from his place above his lungs. Some nights, when the gap between his lives was so wide he felt his tendons scream in trying to maintain a grip on them both, body stretched to its limits between the gulf of the shapes it’d been forced into, he’d rest a hand on the being on his ribs, eyes blankly on the seat where he’d told Harris to with all due respect, go fuck himself. It was an experience, feeling his ribs rise and fall for nothing other than himself, just for those silent moments in the dark of his quarters during the lull of the night hours. There were times when he would lay like that for hours with nobody but the selkie and his own breath for company.
Maybe his body would be allowed off the rack one day, but at least his ribs were his own, he’d think when he got tired enough to ignore the scream of the rest of him.
///
The next was much more carefully considered, gotten during a shore leave somewhere with mostly humans as it was. Well, the idea was quite specific. It’d been quite a long time since he’d thought about how to use flowers to speak. Realistically, it’d come in quite handy during his time with the Section, but it went back so far, all the way back into the reaches of times so cotton coated he could barely remember them clearly, his mother sat with him in her lap, an old fashioned print book with hand drawn pictures that’d been passed down through her family for generations. Each flower had a detailed description of both how to care for them as well as their meaning in neat, curling script that flowed across the pages like the watercolor used to paint the plants.
He’d loved that book dearly, no idea what’d happened to it after the first move to Malaysia when it’d mysteriously disappeared (save for the fact that Maddie could quote it by heart the same as him).
That artist had the same kind of old style found in archived nature books, precise, obsessive lines painting a picture so clear even an idiot could connect plant to paper. A pink lotus, tips stained a hot magenta that faded to a shade so pale it was almost white in the center of the meat of the outside of his thigh. Pink belladonnas with their buttery yellow middles in a bed underneath it, vivid black berries visible peeked through their petals and stems. Purple columbines with their brilliant white centers and their dark stamens spotted through the whole piece all the way up to the swell of his pelvic bone. Striped carnations with a magenta so flaming it was almost red around the tips of their petals dotted in a sea of green around the sides of the lotus. Last, bunches of purple-pink rhododendrons above with their orangey stamens like streaks of light from a setting sun.
Just like last time, his skin was bright red, tender, and irritable. There was a great deal more scar tissue on his thigh as well, so in combination with the detail required, it’d taken a lot more time to finish in total. There was also the fact that walking was an experience with his uniform pressing uncomfortably on the skin before it was strictly ready to deal with that. It did not, however, ruin the tattoo, so a little discomfort was perfectly alright by his count.
As far as messages went, it was rather opaque, he supposed; not only was it somewhere people almost never saw, but it was also in a language that was nearly forgotten to time. For how silly it made him feel he was grateful for that opacity, though. A resolution to refuse to be silent and a warning that he was someone different? He’d become someone new so very many times it felt pointless to mark the occasion at all, let alone with something so permanent.
In actual point of fact, he rarely saw it himself. But then he’d be showering, or sat in his quarters in his pants, and he’d catch a glimpse of those painstakingly rendered petals. He’d smell old paper, the notes of his mother’s perfume, ancient book glue, feel silky petals between his fingers and the solid, woody sensation of the stems that kept those all too delicate things alive. The skin didn’t feel any different for the ink in it, but he fancied it felt like those petals sometimes in the hypnagogic cavern between sleep and wakefulness. Something soft between the harsh ridges of ropey scar tissue left behind from an innumerable amount of putting himself between one thing and another.
///
Being a Reed meant a lot of time near the ocean, and with a lot of time near the ocean came a familiarity with seabirds. There were Steller’s sea eagles with their massive, dark bulks of feathers and their great yellow chunks of beaks who seemed like they shouldn’t be able to fly except that they could . There were the puffins, clumsy little fliers with their glossy black feathers and their ferocious fight to get food back where it belonged with so many thieves afoot near the cliffs they lived in when they had babies. And of course, there were the gulls, the clever, obnoxious, determined, scarily long lived gulls who found food with the same unerring reliability as squirrels .
But the ospreys were something special .
Malcolm had learned very early that there was nothing quite as dangerous to a fish as a hungry osprey. They were incredibly capable hunters with a higher catch rate than many other predators like them. But that wasn’t what made them special. No, what made them special was that they were quite literally the only birds still living in their family. There were no other birds at all like them anywhere, and they were tough enough to make a home almost anywhere there were fish to eat and they mated for life, something as scarily long as the gulls. They were stunning as well, with wide wings a shiny dark brown on the backs with that white-and-brown striping on the underside, those bright white breasts and bellies, their neat white feet with wicked black talons that had scales to help them catch their prey and their reversible toes. Then there were their eyes , a piercing golden yellow that stared into the soul from head on. They could fully submerge themselves in water and still take flight afterwards thanks to the oil that coated their feathers.
Needless to say, a terrified young Malcolm watching them fish had been struck by them for as long as he could remember. They were something to watch when he had the chance. Like a return for the fact that he was surrounded by death on all sides should he slip off the boat (despite the fact that he was a perfectly capable swimmer). He’d watch those signature bent-wristed wings, the dives, the steady flight, and for a little while, he’d forget the fear in favor of watching them just be .
It was the first time Malcolm had been back in England since they’d shipped off after the Augments. In truth he hadn’t spent much time there even after everything that’d happened in the Expanse, just enough to say hello to Maddie and see that she was well before he’d run for the ends of the Earth (somewhat literally, Antarctica remained an excellent place for someone who wanted to be busy enough not to have to think too much).
The parlor he’d walked into was ancient, a staple of the area going back to the 1980s with a sterling reputation they’d maintained through every hardship that’d tested the place with the love of everyone even remotely interested in body modification close enough to make a difference to them. His face was, unfortunately, still quite recognizable, but nobody gave him any shite. It was a welcome change of pace to how Las Vegas had been the week before when he’d gone with Trip on the commander’s insistence.
Malcolm saw the artist (a grizzled old timer with more ink than natural skin, a shaved head, and metal in every available place to pierce) trace over his existing ink with keen eyes as he explained what he wanted. Their mouth quirked at his flowers with a full snicker at the rhododendrons. The only suggestion when he was finished was to put the osprey on his back instead of his chest for the balance.
His osprey, when she was done, spread across the expanse of the upper half of his back as she was due. She’d been drawn from the side, water trailing off her wings with her feet just surfacing from the sea, brown feathers on one side and the dirty looking mix of the undersides of her flight feathers that were standard to British ospreys on the other. She was harsh lines, sharp angles, blinding white and deep dark brown and glaring, piercing yellow that stared into his soul from her place on his back. There was nothing soft about her, those drops of water trailing from her sharp as daggers in how they’d been colored.
She was ferocious, she was free, she was something that went from one element to another without fear of them in the slightest.
Long after he’d healed, when her color had settled into his skin, when she was part of him like his selkie and his flowers, he’d feel her there on his back. She was as steady a presence as the selkie, alive in the same unnatural way. As much as space wasn’t somewhere she belonged, she ruled it the same as the places she’d been made for regardless and he was along for the ride, her carrying him in those talons hidden beneath the white foam of the water he’d taken on with her.
///
It was after his fourth (an exceptionally neat line of dusty gold Vulcan script on his left arm that read ‘the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one’ written in T’Pol’s hand and tattooed by a Vulcan with a mural of so many different sayings, animals, and pictographs that it’d been difficult to see them for each other in the watercolor swirl of it all across her dark skin) that Trip had asked him about it. They were in decon, Malcolm carefully timing his moisturizer applications in between settling into the cleanliness of the place despite the oily slick of the gel on his skin that made him want to crawl out of it. He’d been aware in a background sort of way that Trip had been watching him laying prone on the bench for some time; specifically that he’d been watching Malcolm’s lady on his back. Trip tended to zone out when he wasn’t actively working on something (sometimes even when he was depending on the day), so he’d ignored it right until he’d been rudely jolted out of his meditative state without any warning at all.
“You’re getting awfully arty there, Lieutenant,” Trip said playfully. “I’d think you were body snatched if I didn’t know any better.”
There was a prick of something Malcolm couldn’t name underneath the discontent of having his rest interrupted just when he’d been settling in for a potential nap. “Yes, well, there’s nothing against them in the regulations.”
For a second the pit in his stomach felt like years of sticking his foot in his mouth before Trip laughed.
“You’d know better than I would. They’re nice. I think that osprey of yours is going to eat me, though.”
The laugh came out rough with the edge of sleep and that pit in his stomach disappeared.
“Unless you’ve somehow managed to hide you being a merman from us all, I doubt you’d be very interesting to her.”
Without being able to see, Malcolm felt the moment Trip’s eyes shifted from looking at his osprey to being zoned out properly. For some reason, his tattoos felt warmer in places like that. In the back of his head, the part he never really acknowledged as being part of him at all, he wondered if having his whole body covered would make it feel like he was wrapped in a blanket, the way the ink felt.
///
The fifth was the first true spur of the moment decision out of all of them. An away mission gone wrong with him having been trapped on a planet with a pre-warp warrior culture who saw anyone with bare skin as being up for grabs. It’d been a potential nightmare for him until they’d caught sight of his Vulcan script curling around his arm. After that, he’d been taken down to his blues for them to test if his pieces were real (something that involved entirely too many lukewarm showers with fire hydrant level water pressure for comfort). And then they hadn’t really known what to do with him. After all, an alien who clearly wasn’t one of them, what with not having skin that looked like it was made out of a collection of gravel, but was intelligent enough to have figured out tattoos was a bit of a struggle.
So he’d been left to rot for at least a day in a cell with no company except the thankfully not-too-public toilet, a surprisingly comfortable cot, control of his own light switches, and a collection of books printed in their smoke-curl like language that he couldn’t make heads or tails of. Suffice to say that he’d teetered between lethal levels of boredom and anxiety about what, exactly, was going to be done to him before Enterprise could mount a rescue. And wasn’t that just odd, to be worried about that. It’d been so long since he’d genuinely worried about being hurt that the feeling was completely foreign to the point that he hadn’t realized that was what it was until he’d been laying in the dark, a hand on his selkie to feel that he was still alive and relatively whole.
One night wasn’t torture in the slightest, not with the lights being gentle, having so much control over his environment, having a modicum of privacy. No, Malcolm had dealt with far worse and been alright in not slightly the worse for wear before he got a good night’s sleep to unwind from it all. That said, he was more than ready not to see the same walls when they came to get him from the room.
There were two of them, giants that stood at least a meter taller than him each with skin not unlike the Thing from one of Trip’s comic books only in varying shades of grey that depended on which rocky cell one was looking at. The tattoos were where it got interesting. They were covered in swirling patterns of purple, red, pink, orange, yellow. Each one looked like a different kind of fire, complete with a black-grey-white pattern of smoke that apparently told the story of the trial they’d gone through to earn that tattoo. And they were all done by pushing the ink through between the joints of their cell plating from what Malcolm had been able to gather before his disguise had failed.
They walked him down colorful corridors, painted in royal purple with smokey swirls of signs at every junction, not touching him, just close enough to keep him from going anywhere if he got smart. After they’d figured out that his skin wasn’t as tough as theirs they’d gotten scared to touch him. Could come in handy, not that he was tempted to test his luck just then.
He was brought to what looked like, essentially, a hotel room of sorts. There was another cot, windows to the harsh desert that made up most of their planet, a washroom that had an actual door, and (miraculously) his scanner. Still no progress on communication, but him and them, they’d managed to figure out that he understood body language to a certain extent, so the taller of the two, the one with an expansive purple-wine red-scarlet blaze that faded into quite the epic of words across their chest, mimed that he should go in. Well, alright then, in he went.
And there he stayed for at least another day by the planet’s sun. Malcolm was somewhat ashamed to say he hadn’t tried to run, but the way they’d treated him. Well, he had a gut feeling about it, something that kept him rooted with his scanner taking as many readings as possible. That and finding somewhere to hide a book for Hoshi to pour over later.
He was so intent that he didn’t notice the telltale tingle of the transporter until the world disappeared in front of his eyes and he was back aboard Enterprise in nothing but his blues.
All told, it should’ve been nothing more than a footnote, but he couldn’t get that tattoo out of his head, the wild purple blaze of it with a story he’d never be able to read in its smoke. It sat simmering in the back of his mind for months until they were on another space station, another short leave while Trip and Travis went to get parts to improve the output of the shuttlepods’ engines. He hadn’t gone there with the intention of getting another tattoo, but the smell of ink and antiseptic pulled him in like a bloody siren and he was on the chair with temporary pen ink on his skin in the shape of a ruby red phoenix with obsidian glittery back feathers drawn in the blocky art style of the Andorian artist whose hands were so cold they gave him goosebumps with every touch, even through their thick neoprene gloves. The phoenix had a pile of silvery grey ashes below it on his navel while its wings spread almost up to his collarbones. Whether it was a tribute to the people who’d given him something to think about or just another thing that resonated with the lotus he couldn’t quite tell just then.
He got up, said it was good, then felt the burn of it under his shirt all the way back to the shuttlepod.
It was strangely appropriate.
He never regretted it.
///
Malcolm didn’t bother keeping count after number five, really. Not that he couldn’t have said how many pieces of art he had on his body, more that it became about the soul of them, what they represented, rather than the fact that they were present. His skin under his uniform slowly transformed into a canvas full of color in the same way as the artists who’d turned him into one, every piece feeling slightly different to him despite how the skin itself never really changed. From neck to ankle, he had pieces all over him that most people on the ship never saw given the schedule he kept. Phlox found the whole thing endlessly fascinating as they’d never had a tradition of tattooing on Denobula according to him.
Trip asked after every single one, some sort of sixth sense for when Malcolm had gone out to get something put on again. Or maybe that was just the moisturizer. Regardless, probably the only living soul aboard the ship who knew Malcolm’s ink better than himself and Phlox would’ve been Trip.
They were in decon again, a year after that first conversation, Malcolm laying on his stomach half asleep while Trip thought about whatever it was he had in his head that he’d either share or he wouldn’t. It was peaceful after the mission they’d just had, a hellish undercover op that’d reminded Malcolm of his Section days far more than he would’ve liked. The weight of his tattoos was a blessing then, not that he would’ve said that. Reminders, all of them, of where and who he was those days. Sometimes, his tendons didn’t even scream anymore for keeping the disparate parts of himself connected.
“You know, I think you look more like you now,” Trip said, again out of the blue, though that time quietly enough that for a second, Malcolm wasn’t certain if he’d actually said anything.
“What’s that?”
“When you first started getting tattoos, it was weird, you know? Because that just seemed so… unlike you. But now, I think I get it. I see you in them more than in your face if that makes sense.”
There was something hot and tight in Malcolm’s throat, lips twitching into a smile without him having to think about it in the slightest.
“Oh, it makes sense. Sir.”
Trip sighed disgustedly, kicking at Malcolm’s hand from the other bench and missing by a meter.
It was warm, Malcolm was relaxed, and he felt like he was wrapped in a blanket of the things he’d picked up of the years.
Perhaps that wasn’t so bad with the right place and the right people after all that time without them.