Crash the Gates

[Lucy Serrano-Blaise]

New roommates was weird for most people. By now, Lucy was completely used to it. She was very aware that she was the longest standing individual in 2-0-2 now, and so now more than ever it felt like it was primarily her space.

It didn't mean she wasn't about to talk to them. After managing to develop some kind of friendship with the last person who left here, she was curious about the rest. And given the kind of work she did in tandem with the ink she herself wore, it was probably no surprise that she was a little more curious about the fellow tatted-up meta than the pop-culture crazy who lived there, too.

Most people had the tact to wait until there was an accidental run-in. Hell, some people camped out in their common room to catch people, they were that keen. Lucy Serrano was blunt, and as such preferred the relatively direct approach of knocking on the door when she knew he was around.

So she did, and as she waited for it to open she pressed her forearm against the door frame and leant against it. When it opened, she didn't bother with the standard hello. She didn't ask how he was.

Direct. Like woah.

"You eighteen?" Lucy asked, tilting her head to one side.

[Dennis Pautler]

Dennis appeared through a crack in the door first. When he saw who it was – his roommate, with the tats – he opened it up the whole way. He didn’t know who else would show up at his door, except someone who lived here. But he’d just gotten out of bed, and he was off to a slow start. Dennis had droopy eyes and his short hair was mussed and his shirt was all twisted around in sleep. She asked his age, instead of a ‘good morning’, or something routine like that; he blinked at her bemusedly. “Uh,” he said, reaching up to pinch the space between his eyes, smiling.

Dennis lifted his head. “I’m sixteen,” he responded, finally.

Yet he towered. He could tell why she’d asked. He’d hadn’t stopped growing since he was born, with his long arms and his long legs, like beanstalks. “He’ll bump his head on the roof,” his grandmother had said.

Dennis gestured, in a shrugging kind of way, towards her arm. “Hey, I like your ink. Don’t think I told you before.”

[Lucy Serrano-Blaise]

Immediately, Lucy wondered what the time was. She wasn't entirely sure - truth be told, she never really checked. She was dragged awake at earlier hours of the morning as of late through no fault of her own. Her gaze tracked down his form as he opened the door a little more. Eyes half open. Shirt all twisted up. She idly missed the idea of being able to sleep in.

Sixteen, he said. Her eyes widened a little on instinct before her expression settled again.

Lucy felt the eyes of the inhabitants on her skin all shift to look at him the moment he spoke about her tattoos, as if the mere mention of them was enough to capture their attention. She tracked her free hand through her dark hair, shifting it all to one side over her shoulder.

"So are they all illegal, or did you get them in different states?" She asked, "Do they even change the legal age in different states here? Or does the whole country have a collective pole up its ass?"

But that brought up an even more imperative question, and before anything went too far, she continued on; "Are you even from here?"

[Dennis Pautler]

Dennis looked down, as if he’d just noticed them. “Oh, no. These are definitely illegal,” he said.

He was inked from top to bottom. He’d a small upside-down cross under his left eye, and a right-side up one on his chest; there was a bird in sweeping water color strokes on the side of his neck, an ornate skull on his right shoulder, and dark stencil-like outlines all the way down his left; he’d a spider-web on his elbow; the backs of his fingers said MISC, one letter on each. That was to say nothing of what he had below the waist. It was an extensive project and something his grandparents were exasperated to discover that he’d spent yet more money and space on his skin for another.

“I’m from Arkansas, actually,” he said, gesturing with his thumb over his shoulder, as though it were just around the corner. “Listen, I don’t want to tell you too many details, you know,” he laughed, “but it’s a good deal. He wants to get in the business. I get tats and he gets pictures for his, uh, portfolio.”

Dennis adjusted his ruffled shirt. “Can you believe I was smooth as a baby when I got here?”

[Lucy Serrano-Blaise]

As he looked down at his tattoos, Lucy's eyes instinctively widened. It might have been Ivy's definite words in her ear, but her nose crinkled at the idea of illegal tattoos. Then the sparrows at her hips stretched their wings, as if to remind her of that faithful night, drunk in someone's kitchen at the very illegal age of fifteen.

Her tilted head dragged her eyes towards his neck. Birds flock together.

Arkansas. Confusion coloured the Australian's features as she lowered her eyebrows. "Dunno where that is." She replied with a small shrug of her shoulders.

She grinned instinctively when she mentioned just how he looked when he first got here. Raising her free hand, she tapped her palm against the lion on her forearm. "Got it done like, a day before I flew in." Which, for anyone else, might have been a ridiculous move to make.

"Not trying to be a dick here, but they're a little messed up."

[Dennis Pautler]

He wasn’t surprised. He could tell she wasn’t from the States, just judging on the way she spoke, but not even Americans knew where Arkansas was half the time. “Oh, it’s a ways away,” he replied, and left it at that.

He had a fine appreciation of all the ink she had on her; she was obviously a girl of good taste, according to him, anyway. He didn’t have many like the lion on her forearm, most of them being daggers or skulls or knives, or black stenciling just under his knuckles. Looking at it now, though, made him reconsider. A lion would be pretty cool. Or a tiger. Or, well, his friends had always said he was more of a canine kind of guy. Too bad the spaces on his arms were more or less all taken up.

“Huh?” His first thought were the colors. Green was nothing but gray to him (and people would be surprised to learn how much of green was in everything), and he wondered if it looked odd to her, like they’d pulled one on him and made the skull a bright puke green or a neon green or something it obviously shouldn’t be. Alarmed, he looked down, running a hand over his opposite arm. He couldn’t see the ones on his face, but he reached up to put a hand over the sparrow, anyway. “It, it is? You serious?”

Dennis turned, arching his neck to look over his shoulder. “Where?”

[Lucy Serrano-Blaise]

Tact was an important thing. It was a nature the Australian lacked in almost every aspect. While at work Lucy could manage a bit of a difference, but for the most part being blunt was her go-to response. They weren't at work. They were in their dorm. One tattooed individual to another. And it was all Lucy could do not to interject cleaner marks into his ink without his approval.

Pressing her lips together, Lucy watched the panic rise on his features. Yeah, maybe it wasn't the right way to explain herself. Maybe she was just being a bit of a dick.

"Everywhere." She continued, the corner of her mouth dragging down. She raised her hand, waving in his direction, "Not like, super fucked or anything like that, it's just-"

How to explain this properly. He mightn't have seen the movements of her own work. He mightn't have noticed the roaring rocket circling her thigh when he first moved in. "I tattoo people." Lucy started, "I do stuff with ink, though. It's my thing. It's why I'm here? I've had some of this shit on me for four years and it's never needed a single touch up." Four years of a lion on her forearm and not a single bleeding ink line. Not an ounce of fading from the shades of yellow and orange. Like a freshly healed piece of work, it looked constantly new. They all did.

"Some shit just can't get done with a needle, y'know?"

[Dennis Pautler]

He was beginning to think this wasn’t so much as a botched line as it was a general critique. And he didn’t know how to handle that. Most of the time people gushed over his tatts – or more like all of the time – though he was the first to admit that his life as The Tattoo Kid was short. Once or twice he might have got a weird look from a senior citizen or something, but he didn’t really count those. The most he could do was shift his feet and lift a hand to rub the back of his neck. One half of his face lifted into a scrunched up grimace. Dennis wasn’t real combative, so he was hoping he could still get out of this with a smile.

“Oh. Yeah, I guess you get what you paid for,” he said. “Well, I did pay for these, but, you know…” He let the sentence taper off with a shrug.

So she was a tattoo artist herself. That might explain it. Dennis was no artist: he appreciated work when he saw it, but he’d no real discerning eye. He wondered if there was something she could see that he couldn’t. There must have been. Dennis thought every etching on his body was Dope, as he liked to say. “Wait, so, uh…” he squinted. “You can keep tattoos fresh?”

[Lucy Serrano-Blaise]

There were little things that made certain moments a little more obvious. The way he ran his hand over the back of his neck; how he couldn't seem to really sit still. Lucy ran her tongue across her lower lip quickly - had she the capacity to really feel bad for calling someone out, she might have in that moment. More to the point, she was just pretty sure she made it super awkward.

But no. Seriously. She couldn't live with those in her sight line for another set of months.

"It always bleeds in the end, right?" Lucy tried; a thought to finish his trailed sentence, though given the age of his she knew he must have known such a thing. Tattoos could lose their image after a while, ink fading and stretching out of form from the most minor instance to something more obvious.

With a wave of her hand, she indicated towards her own neck. "Could give you a comparison to that sparrow you're sporting, but mine're a bit too low." A small stretch to raise her shirt slightly, and the tips of sparrows wings peered out from the low line of her jeans.

"Could clean it up for you."

[Dennis Pautler]

“You can do that?” he asked, perking up.

He spotted the sparrow wings peeking out from underneath her jeans and averted his gaze. Dennis might have been living in a dorm full of girls now, but his background was that prudent little farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Once he got a good look at that sparrow he’d start wondering what else she had down there. At least he didn’t blush.

“Are you talking about the bird, or all of them?” he asked. “I have a lot, you know. They’re all over.” It’d be hard work on her part and probably expensive on his.