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Chapter four
RUBY
I’ve spent three nights drawing Zander Hale’s arm.
Not his actual arm, obviously. That would be excessive even by my current standards.
The design.
I keep telling myself that distinction matters.
By the time he walks into Black Fern for his first session, I’ve printed the final stencil twice, adjusted the curve along the shoulder three times, and moved one section of the sound-wave line less than half an inch because the original placement bothered me every time I looked at it.
Nell notices all of this and has the good sense not to comment.
Zander steps through the front door wearing jeans, a faded black T-shirt, and the same relaxed confidence that had me swearing at him within minutes of meeting him. His eyes find me almost immediately.
“Morning, neighbor.”
“It was.”
His smile widens when he catches my expression. “That’s quite a welcome.”
“You’re here for a tattoo, not a parade.”
“And here I was hoping you’d missed me.”
I hear Nell laugh quietly behind the counter, but I ignore her and motion toward my station. “Come on. I want you to see the final design before I put anything on you.”
Zander follows me back, and I pull the printed artwork from the folder on my counter. He gets unusually quiet when I slide it toward him, and that alone tells me he’s taking it seriously.
The design begins with a long, sweeping line that will follow the outside of his upper arm and curve toward his shoulder. I used the route of the European tour as the foundation, then stripped away anything that made it look too much like a map. The cities are still there in the shifts of direction, small breaks, and carefully placed marks, but someone looking at the finished piece won’t immediately know what they mean.
The part I spent the most time on runs through the center.
After our consultation, I found a video someone posted from Hollow North’s Amsterdam show. The quality is awful, with shaky camera work and stage lights blowing out half the image, but the crowd comes through clearly during the chorus. I pulled the audio and isolated a small section of the waveform, just the fans singing back to them during the moment Zander told me everything started to feel real.
That waveform now runs through the design in a thin black line, tying the movement of the tour together without turning the whole thing into an obvious musician tattoo.
Zander leans closer, studying it long enough that I start wondering what he’s thinking.
“You used the Amsterdam show.”
“Part of it.”
He holds one finger over the waveform without touching the paper. “That’s the crowd?”
“From the second chorus.”
His eyes come to mine. “You watched the video?”
“You told me that moment mattered.”
He looks back down, quieter than I’m used to seeing him. After another few seconds, he shakes his head slightly. “This is fucking incredible.”
I shouldn’t care quite so much about the way he says it, but I do. I’ve been tattooing long enough to know when a client simply likes a design and when they recognize something personal in it. Zander isn’t just looking at a tattoo he thinks is cool. He sees the six months he told me about in something I created.
“You don’t have to sound so surprised,” I say.
