You Are Ours

Chapter 30

N I C H O L A S

I WATCH AS Ryan walks towards Benji, sitting down on the chair next to the tattooing bed and lays her arm flat, exposing her wrist for her tattoo. When we sat on the couch, she was shaking like a leaf from how nervous she is. Hearing Matthew complain how badly his hurt clearly didn't help to calm her nerves, and I think she's more nervous now than when she first walked into the house.
Ryan always expressed her interest in getting a tattoo when she was with me. I remember when she was 15 years old and was there for my upper arm sleeve I got for my mom. Ryan was just a kid then and in no way ready to be making decisions about tattooing her body. Only I was one to talk. I got my first tattoo at 14 years with a really bad fake ID, and I was just as nervous then as Ryan is now.

"Princess?" I say as I kneel next to her. Her leg is bobbing up and down, anxiously bouncing to a beat of nerves, something she and I share, but she needs to stay calm. "Just take deep breaths, okay? You need to stay still so Benji doesn't mess it up." I laugh, trying to ease her.

"Mess up? Dude... What the fuck?" He chuckles with his shoulders shrugged then he turns his attention to the quivering girl next to me. "It's okay, Ryan. You just tell me when to stop if it starts to hurt too bad, okay?" Benji says and I give him a small smile to thank him for being so considerate towards her. "I'm just gonna go stencil this out."

Benji has never gone easy on me when he has tattooed me over the last two and a half years, even on the painful ones. When I found him he was one of the only few artists I found that was comfortable tattooing over scar tissue and believe me, I had a lot of scars to cover. Loads of artists turned me down, but Benji was willing to give it a shot. And thank fuck he didn't back down.
That first session with Noah, Nat, and I on our matching sibling tattoo was a harsh sitting. All Benji did was moan how much we whined and complained about the pain, only what do you expect when all three of us were getting a tattoo down our rib cages. When I asked him if he could cover the "war wounds" I use to call them on my stomach and back, he jumped at the chance to help me out. I can't tell you how much money I've paid him to cover almost my entire body in ink, but all of it was worth it. Every single masterpiece.

Ryan sits still , bouncing her leg, nervously watching as Benji stencils the tattoo she picked out. When he beckons for her wrist she starts to bite her nails and I know I need to do something to keep her calm. "Stand up princess." She doesn't hesitate and does as I ask.
I sit on the chair she was just sitting in and I grab her hips, moving her in front of me to sit her down on my lap. The sweet scent of marshmallows and her amazing perfume engulf me and I inhale deep to smell her. Wrapping my arms around her waist, my chin resting on her shoulder I whisper in her ear as my hands disappear under her t-shirt, stroking her soft skin soothingly, "it's gonna be okay princess, you just need to calm your nerves. I'm here, okay?" She nods and places her wrist down while Benji looks at me with an amused grin. Not only is he my tattoo artist, but I'm lucky enough to call him a friend and the soft, gentle guy I sometimes tend to be around Ryan is never seen by many. And certainly not Benji.

Clearing his throat he asks, "ready?"

Ryan takes a deep breath and nods her head. He places the stencil down and I finally see what tattoo she was getting. It's a treble clef and bass clef formed into a heart. I smile down at the piece of art she's picked, knowing how much music means to her because it means just as much to me.

"It's perfect for her," I think with a smile.

As much as she loved reading and writing, music was always number one for her. Ryan always said that it didn't matter what language you spoke, music always brought people together, even if you knew the words or not and I agreed with her. You could be in a different country, listening to music in another language, but if there was a good beat and rhythm you know it would get people on their feet.
She use to say that there was a song for everything. For love, for happiness, for sadness, for lost and some had the power to provoke memories. It doesn't surprise me she's getting a tattoo like this, it just shows how much she's thought about it and how much she cared about something being apart of her body for the rest of her life.