Anyway, I was a bit of a mess.
“Here’s what I drew up for you,” Riggs said, turning an iPad around and showing me an actual rendered sketch of the cut and paste job I’d walked in with. It was better than I could have hoped for, the trees disappearing into the brick and concrete like they were meant to be joined forever in the first place.
“I love it,” I said, looking down at my arm.
“Cool. I’ve got to shave your arm and then I’ll get the stencil on and if it all looks good, we’ll get started.”
Riggs explained every step of the process, from the shaving to the gel he smoothed over my chillingly bare arm. He pressed the stencil into my skin and carefully lifted the backer paper away to reveal the bones of a tattoo around my forearm. It was a big tattoo, considering I had none in the first place, but seeing it on my skin in the reflection of his full-length mirror felt achingly right in a way I didn’t have words for.
“I love it,” I said again, and when I looked from the mirror to Riggs, there was some indecipherable emotion mapped across his face. I blinked and it was gone, and he gestured toward the chair and an arm rest, and before I knew it, he was ready to start.
“This is gonna be a long day, so if you need breaks, let me know. Okay?”
I nodded, and the quiet of the tattoo shop was broken by the piercing whir of his tattoo machine kicking to life. Riggs used his gloved hands to stretch the skin around my wrist, and then the needle sank beneath my flesh and we were off. The pain was sharper and clearer than I expected, and at first contact, I visibly winced. Riggs inked out a short line and leaned back, dark eyes studying me carefully.
“Good?” he asked.
I swallowed and nodded.
He returned his focus to my arm, to the cluster of Ponderosa trunks that wrapped my wrist. I watched him work, attention caught in a snare. The meticulousness of his lines was hypnotic, even if I had no idea how he could see what he was doing. There was blood and ink all over my arm already, but Riggs just inked and wiped, inked and wiped.
It took a few minutes for me to settle against the back of the chair, and by then the pain had turned into something expected. I was getting a tattoo. My brothers were going to lose their minds. Lincoln would probably buy me a drink over the whole thing. I smiled to myself and closed my eyes, letting the vibration of the needles rock me into a quiet lull.
I had no idea how much time passed, but eventually, Riggs made it up to the tops of the trees, and I asked him, “How long have you been tattooing for?”
He paused, wiped, re-inked the needle.
“Since I was nineteen.”
“And how old are you now?”
He glanced up at me, eyes insufferably dark and handsome.
“Older than twenty-five,” he said.
“Obviously.”
He snorted a laugh and used his gloved pinky to wipe a smear of ink off my arm.
“I’m thirty-six,” he answered.
“I have two brothers that age,” I said.
“Twins?”
He passed the needle over a nerve, a bright flare of biting pain racing up the length of my arm. I grunted, flinching at the shock.
“Don’t forget to breathe,” Riggs murmured, and I realized I hadn’t been.
I let my breath out in a rush, sucking in one immediately after and refilling my lungs. Riggs waited until I’d settled back into a normal breathing pattern before returning to his work.
“They’re not twins,” I answered him finally. “My family tree is messy.”
He made a thoughtful sound in the back of his throat and nodded. He didn’t ask for more information, but I found myself wanting to give it to him anyway. “My father basically bought me and my brothers from our mothers. It’s really atrocious to say out loud.”
The climb of the needle paused briefly, then resumed.
“I have three brothers… well, four now. They’re all half-brothers. Finn and Hunter are the same age, only a few weeks apart. Marshall is almost forty, and I’m the baby,” I said.
