1Part of the Tattoo Challenge by sick-atxxheart in the HPFC forum.
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The needle pierced his skin, letting the ink form a lovely work of art on his skin. But it wasn't art. It was a reminder of how cruel and unjust life was. It wasn't lovely. It was loveless. It was a reminder of a loveless life for him. His love was gone. Gone like the wind. Gone like his childhood. She was gone.
He wasn't watching the tattoo forming on his skin. The dirty tattoo artist started to strike a conversation. This went ignored. The young man getting the tattoo closed his eyes. The uncomfortable feeling of a needle on his back.
The tattoo artist rattled on again about his wife and kids or something. Draco sighed.
"Could you please stop talking?" He snapped, causing the artist to shut his mouth.
"Well, your tattoo is done. That will be fifteen pounds, pal." The tattoo artist said, walking behind the counter. Draco paid him the money, waved, and walked out the door, letting it slam.
At home, he threw his mail on the table, walking to his bedroom. He took off his t-shirt. He turned so that he could see some of the many tattoos on his back. He looked at the intricate design of all of the tattoos connected in some way. Sure, he looked like a freak from behind, but his tattoos represent all the wasted years, everything that was lost.
And the only thing that was really lost, was her, and the years he spent blinded and drunk. But it felt like everything he had was down under the dirt where she was lying.
Draco started getting the tattoos the first day she was buried. He left the funeral and went to a dirty old parlor and got a rose. A single black rose on his shoulder blade. He only got it in memory of her. Now, once a month, every month, on the fifteenth, he gets a new tattoo, in memory of her. What started as a black rose, as clichéd as that was, turned into a collage of different things. But in the center of the tattoo was the most exquisite portrait to be put in a tattoo. In the center, was a picture of her and him on their wedding day.
He reached back, his muscles flexing, and stroked her picture in her wedding dress. He thought back to when she first died. He spent every waking hour with a bottle of some kind of alcohol in his hand. He tried to dull the aching and throbbing pain in his chest to a small hum, like the wires that connected his telephone to another. But the wires that connected his heart to hers would always have a large electric voltage. The electricity would always form fires. The electricity would never have a blackout. Because he still loved her.
And, dammit, albeit she was dead and buried under the ground with grass growing on the dirt, she still loved him. He could feel it. He knew that in her afterlife, if there was such thing, she was loving him with all that she had. And she was shaking her head at his tattoos. But she was in admiration, because he would get all of this ink put onto his skin for her. He knew that if she were with him, she'd scold him about the possible diseases from the tattoos. And he would roll his eyes, wrap his arms around her, press a kiss to her hair, and tell her that it was all for her. And she wouldn't object, because she would be intoxicated by his smell, and his kisses that would have formed down her jaw line by now.
He put his t-shirt back on, walking over to his bed. His tattoo was tender, but he didn't care. He lid on his back. He figured that was the last tattoo he would get, after all, he had started this trend when he was dangerously intoxicated, and finished when he was dangerously upset.
He liked to call the years that he was drunk his "wasted years." For the simple fact, that that's exactly what he was.
So as he lid on his bed, his back aching, his heart aching, and his eyes wandering. He thought about his newest tattoo.
And he thought of what it read,
"Rest in peace, Mrs. Hermione-Granger Malfoy."