Happy early birthday Lianne (still-recruiting) who has given me so much inspiration! The idea of Dean as a tattoo artist is dear to me and I'm glad to have finally gotten this out.

Luna is one of the first to visit him when he's working in a Muggle shop. Dressed in a glittering sundress, she swans up to the receptionist and says, "Hello, I'd like to get a tattoo please."

Dean ushers her into the back and spreads out pen and paper. "What were you thinking?"

"Hm?"

"What did you want a tattoo of?"

She smiles serenely. "Oh, whatever you'd like, I suppose."

He tries very hard to contain his bafflement. "I think it should be…a personal decision," he tells her. "It's going to be on your body forever, after all."

"Yes, of course," Luna replies earnestly. "I'd like you to give me something from you, like a gift."

Dean thoughtfully looks back at her, contemplating what he would put on her body if it were his, what part of himself he could give to her.

"I trust you," she says.

He outlines a small seashell on the top of her foot. When she sees it, she reaches up around his neck and pulls him down into the chair.

He learns the art of tattooing by magic, holding his wand like a pen and conjuring the ink under the skin. At first he hates that the ink can be vanished as well. The very nature of a tattoo, he always thought, was derived from its permanence. He gets customers who decorate and redecorate their bodies every month or two like moving furniture around a room, and is privately angered by their frivolity.

"There's no need to be so pretentious," says Lavender to him when he's drunk and complaining. She's never gotten a tattoo but she too is in the business of fashion statements. "There's nothing wrong with changing."

"There's nothing wrong with it, but they're making the whole thing meaningless—"

"What do you want to be giving out?" she sneers. "Dark Marks?"

He has been met with mild suspicion. Body marking is so thoroughly entwined with Voldemort in the public memory that the most innocent of tattoos can be seen as a symbol of sinister intent.

Hermione takes particular offense. She marches in one day and pushes up her sleeve, showing him the spot where a Dark Mark would be, and gives him that old determined look he knows so well. "Give me something nice."

"Something nice?"

"Oh, I don't know," she says. "Animals or flowers or something. I just want the opposite of that."

He designs an elegant bouquet of primroses for her, something subtle for a lawyer's arm. The light brown of her skin lends a warmth to the soft colors.

Her eyes glisten a little and Dean looks away in embarrassment.

Perhaps, he thinks, the impermanence is a reaction against the stigma of the Dark Marks, turning an irreversible symbol of evil into something fun and beautiful. And he is proud then to have a hand in tearing the old ways down.

"I was thinking about, I dunno, something to honor my parents?" Teddy reclines, his teenage legs too long for the footrest, and glances at him uncertainly.

"Like what?" asks Dean.

"Not sure," says Teddy. "You knew them better than I did."

"You know I barely knew them at all."

"More than me."

Dean pushes up his glasses and looks down at him. Even after so long the boy makes him ache sometimes. "If you're sure, I'd talk to Harry about it."

"I guess," says Teddy. He runs his finger delicately along the edge of the counter and focuses on it. "What do you think I should get?"

"Well, I don't know," says Dean. "That's up to you."

Teddy shrugs. "I've been asking around."

"Ted, do you want a tattoo?"

"S'pose I should get one, shouldn't I?" He looks back up at Dean. "I like the way they look, and I've got a lot that's important to me, yeah?"

"You're only seventeen, you know." Dean reminds him. "If you don't know what you want, you've got time to think about it."

Teddy leans his chin on his hand. "I know I want something. But I hate not knowing."

"Yeah," says Dean, "I hate that too."

"How did you decide?"

Dean doesn't have anything for anyone. He doesn't have reminders of the war or names of people he loves. He has patterns and artwork and beautiful words. "You've got to find something that you want to make part of you," he says. "You'll know."