Chapter Text
The third time Eddie moves out of his mother’s house, he means it. He meant it the first two times, too, but he’s determined to make this one stick. He’s standing up for himself, he’s being brave, he’s getting a tattoo .
The idea seizes him as he walks past a shop with curling script on its door and half the window covered in stark black art, and he follows the whim inside, where the smell of antiseptic almost makes him walk right back out.
“Hi, can I help you?” the guy behind the counter says. He looks like he’s expecting Eddie to ask for directions. Well.
“I’m getting a tattoo,” Eddie says definitively.
“Do you have an appointment?”
Eddie wavers. “No. Do I need one?”
The guy smiles at him, swiveling a little in his chair. “Depends on what you want. I’ve got the afternoon free once Rosie comes back, but if you’re looking for a full back piece, I’d say we should work out a different time.”
“I’m not sure what I want, but…probably not that,” Eddie says, getting a laugh in response.
“Well, now we’ve got a place to start,” the guy says. He stands and holds his hand out across the counter. His hand is free from ink, but his arm is covered in bright colors, tattoos packed together so that no skin peeks through. “I’m Dave.”
“Eddie,” Eddie says, shaking Dave’s hand and hoping his isn’t clammy. “Nice to meet you.”
“You, too, Eddie. Give me a sec and I’ll get some designs for you to look at, and we can figure out what you might want.”
Eddie nods, and Dave gives him another smile before disappearing down the hall. He brings back a book and sits with Eddie at a low table in the front room, letting him flip through pages at his leisure while he asks questions but manages not to make Eddie feel nagged or judged. The book is a combination of drawings and photographs, tattoos Dave has designed and ones he’s actually tattooed. Eddie would consider his tattoo knowledge practically nonexistent, but he likes the bold shapes featured in most of the work.
He’s nearly flipped through the whole thing when he pauses on a page of smaller drawings. His eyes catch on one, and he knows what he wants. He puts a finger on it. “This is the one.”
Dave leans forward to look. “Yeah?” he says, and when Eddie nods, “Alright, cool, we can do that no problem.”
Eddie decides, with Dave’s help, to get it on his ankle. It’s not as noticeable as an arm tattoo, not as hidden as something like his ribs. Dave warns him that it’s one of the more sensitive spots to get tattooed, since it’s so close to bone, but Eddie isn’t deterred. It is, in fact, more of a selling point than anything, but he keeps that to himself.
“Let me know if you wanna tap out or start feeling woozy at any point and I’ll stop,” Dave says once he’s put the stencil on Eddie’s ankle and set him up on a table, everything wrapped in plastic and still smelling faintly of antiseptics.
“Okay,” Eddie says. He can feel the anticipation buzzing through his bloodstream.
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
It hurts. It feels like getting scratched a hundred times and then having someone poke at it immediately. Eddie bites the insides of his cheeks to keep from laughing at the shock of it, the novelty, the fact that this is something he’s doing and it’s going to leave a mark forever, on purpose. And then the buzzing stops and Dave tells him to take a look.
It’s a bit of a maneuver to see the back of his own leg, even with the full length mirror he checked the stencil with, but he looks at the tattoo, dark lines surrounded by red skin and smudged ink.
It hurt, and you can see it. It hurt, and he survived.
His reflection grins like an idiot. “It’s perfect.”