17 tattoos

storm_petrel

1. Clay has a maple leaf tattooed below one shoulder blade, because his unit was on board the USS Princeton when she hit the mines in the Persian Gulf back in ’91, and the Athabaskan escorted her out of the field and sent over a crate of beer when she was done. Clay met some of her officers on leave, after Kuwait, and after a lot of whiskey, somehow ended up with Canadian naval ink. Two of the Athabaskan’s petty officers ended up with the stars and stripes across their hipbones and ass, respectively, so Clay figures he came out ahead. It was a long time ago, though. All Clay’s ink is old.

2. The Virgin Mary’s over Cougar’s heart, and she’s beautiful, one of his better pieces, though his mother smacked his knuckles, twenty-two or not, and called him on his blasphemy. There are twenty-five perfect flames in a halo around her, like pinpricks of candlelight. Those came later, after Bolivia. After that, a heart in her hands. There’s a name in the silver tracery of veins, almost too small to read.

3. Aisha’s eyebrow ring came after she got shot by gunrunners in Bogata. Nineteen and over-fucking-confident and she paid for it. She dragged herself back to her apartment near the factory district, and pulled the bullet out of her thigh with a pair of blunt-nosed pliers, the plastic handles slick with blood, her own hands shaky with it. She lived on canned soup and tap water and morphine for two weeks, and every time she tried to stand, she fell over or threw up. She can remember most of it, and the grinding, crushing helplessness of it all was probably the worst. When she could walk again, she went to a tattoo parlour where a dark-eyed woman held her hand (unnecessary) while she pierced her left brow. There’s a few reasons she did it, but the most important was probably to reassure herself that a hole in her body wasn’t the end of the fucking world.

4. Clay was a fucking mess when he led his first unit, too young and too freaked and too fucking positive that everyone could see it. In retrospect, he figures he probably hid it as well as any other new officer. At the time, he got an eagle tattooed under his heart, because nothing touched those motherfuckers except DDT and power lines.

5. Pooch has Jolene’s name in discreet dark ink where his wedding band should sit. He got that tattoo a week before he proposed, so he was pretty goddamned relieved when she said yes. On missions, on the run, every night before he goes to sleep, he presses his thumb against it, for comfort and for luck.

6. Cougar’s grandfather and great-uncles crossed the Atlantic back in ’36, went to Spain to fight in the Civil War. All the men in Cougar’s family wear this ink, the skull on the Republican flag, muerte a los fascistas in script. His father had his on the back of his right shoulder; Cougar’s is on his left. He remembers when he was young, tracing his fingers over the tattoo on his grandfather’s bicep, still hard as iron even after years and years.

7. Clay does not talk about the butterfly. Not even when Jensen offers all his porn and promised to shut up for two whole days.

8. Her mother’s name is inked on the inside of Aisha’s right wrist. She regretted it, later, having something like that so exposed, on her skin where anyone could see. She had it covered with a black and red chrysanthemum. Aisha can still see her name, though, but only because she knows it’s there.

9. The bull on Jensen’s right arm was the result of long, long night on leave in Sydney, after his first tour in Afghanistan. Jensen was so drunk that there used to be video footage of him proposing marriage to the tattoo artist (who was bald, with an Alan Moore beard and probably pushing sixty) until said footage magically disappeared from the internet. Jensen figured a bull was one of the less embarrassing things who could have ended up with, and chalked it up as a win. He found the tattoo artist’s phone number in his pocket, three days later.

10. Roque has a devil dog across his back. It’s surprisingly lifelike, teeth bared savagely, a set of cross-hairs on the muscular haunch. In Chechnya, shrapnel from a car bomb nicked the top of the design, and the scar it left gave the dog one drooping eye. Roque decided it didn’t bother him too much, because they matched better now.

11. The barbed wire on Pooch’s arm was just poorly-considered.

12. Jensen has a lion on his left bicep, both Sarah and Emma’s sign, because he thought maybe his bull was lonely.

13. There’s a happy cartoon bee on Aisha’s ankle, because it makes her smile.

14. Cougar doesn’t have a tattoo of a cougar, because that would be too obvious. He does have a set of parallel scars on his arm from when he was sixteen years old, and Lauren Jaszewski’s goddamn cockblocking cat scratched him just as she was taking her shirt off. It counts because it hurt just as bad as any ink he ever got. Lauren dumped him two weeks later, which didn’t help in the slightest.

15. The night his son was born, Jolene held his tiny fist over Pooch’s heart and uncurled each little finger to press against his skin. Pooch had a guy ink the outline there. When Clay saw it, later, his eyes got a little soft, but he never said anything.

16. Roque has a jagged bar inked around one arm, just the right size to cover up a name, and maybe a date.

17. Jensen’s relationships work on some kind of modified dog years, where months should really equal years, and years should equal decades. Right now, this means he and Cougar have outlasted fifty percent of American marriages. Jensen’s got Cougar’s initials tattooed on his back, partly to remind himself that Cougar’s always watching it.