Going Inksane (Nice Ink Book 1)

  GOING INKSANE

  by

  TRISH EDMISTEN

  Copyright © 2018 by Trish Edmisten

  All rights reserved.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art provided by Wes Edmisten

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Look for these titles by Trish Edmisten

  For my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Welch, who taught me the proper way to use quotation marks before she shared that knowledge with the rest of the class

  Chapter One

  Heath

  “You’re not really gonna let these faggots tattoo you, are you?”

  I was out of my chair before the asshole even finished his question. Not because I was going to do anything about said asshole but because I knew X would.

  Xavier was the very definition of a teddy bear, big and broad and sort of furry, the last one being something I didn’t like to think about at all. Who wanted to think of their best friend in that way? Not the point though.

  The point was, just because X was a mostly nice, teddy bear of a guy did not mean he wouldn’t handle his shit when someone pissed him off. Pissing off a guy who was six foot five and topped the scales at two-hundred sixty pounds was never a good idea, especially if you were a preppy frat boy like the pair that had just come in.

  There were five of us in the shop, four artists and Damian, our shop manager. Since Damian wasn’t around at the moment, I could only assume he’d gone to the back for something. If he had been around, these guys would have been tossed out by now. Damian may have been the most mild mannered and smartest of the five of us, but he didn’t put up with anyone’s shit.

  Most people looked at Damian and dismissed him as a threat, but that was their mistake. Damian was pretty with his wheat gold hair that he usually wore swept to the side, a la early Justin Bieber, something we gave him endless shit about. The full lips and dark eyes added to the pretty boy look. Not even his ink could make him look menacing. Like his personality, his ink was vibrant and colorful.

  Looks could be deceiving though. To look at any of us, you would never know we all liked the D, every last one of us. Even my little brother, who no shit marched in Pride parades and had a serious love affair with Andrew Christian underwear, didn’t give off the typical gay vibe. His silver painted hair, along with his toned and tattooed physique usually meant people defaulted him to the straight category. At least until he opened his mouth and they were hit with the full blast of his sass.

  Our shop, Going Inksane, offered tattoos and piercings and looked pretty much like any other tattoo shop. It was dark and grungy but not dirty. We didn’t go for that shit and neither would the health department. I just meant it was rough looking, kind of like us, which made me wonder how Frat Boy Number One figured out our preferences, unless…

  “Now, honey, that’s not what you were calling me when I had you in the bathroom at Whispers last weekend.”

  Whispers was the meat market otherwise known as the gay club. Probably the reason Frat Boy Number One was looking at me like he wanted to kick the shit out of me. Not that he could have actually done it. The guy was in reasonably good shape, but I still had at least fifty pounds of solid muscle on him.

  “You remember him now don’t you, babe?” I asked, turning to X.

  X didn’t react to the endearment, but I knew he would give me shit about it later. No matter what people thought, we weren’t together. Never had been. Both of us had a specific type and it wasn’t each other. Not to mention, we were both big mother fuckers.

  Other than that, and the fact that we were both covered in ink, the similarities ended there. I kept my blond hair in a short cut while X had dark hair that reached his shoulders when it wasn’t pulled back from his face in some way or other. My eyes were blue and his were a shade of brown that could be light or dark, depending on his mood. X sported a full beard and moustache while I was clean shaven.

  “I remember now.” X gave Frat Boy Number One a long, suggestive look. “You’re the guy we double stuffed after those sloppy blow jobs you gave us.”

  Flynn’s snort could be heard from where he sat at his station. Though he hadn’t stopped the tattoo he was doing, I had no doubt he had been paying close attention to the entire exchange from the moment it started. If something happened that X and I couldn’t handle, which wasn’t likely, Flynn would be ready to jump in.

  Frat Boy Number One turned an angry shade of red. “Fuck you!”

  “We’ve already done that, honey, and we don’t do repeats,” I said, giving his friend the once over. “What about you? You want a turn?”

  “Look, I don’t give a shit about any of that,” Frat Boy Number Two said. “I just want to get tattooed, and I heard you guys were the best.”

  I had to give the guy props for being brave enough to go for the ego stroke despite his friend looking ready to kill someone. That was about all I was willing to let either of them stroke. Not gonna lie. They were both good-looking, but I didn’t go for prissy, uptight guys.

  That’s not to say I didn’t like a guy who took care of himself or anything. I just didn’t have any interest in guys who were so far in the closet they spent more time looking over their shoulders than at me.

  “Is there a problem here?” Damian asked as he came from the back of the shop to stand at the front counter.

  “Nope, I’m just here for a tattoo,” Frat Boy Number Two answered, and I held back my smile of admiration at his balls.

  “Okay.” Damian looked at me and X. “Are you guys good with that?”

  It didn’t surprise me that he’d picked up on the tension. Damian didn’t miss much.

  “We’ll tattoo you on one condition,” I said.

  Instead of asking what that condition was, Frat Boy Number Two turned toward his obnoxious buddy. “Why don’t you wait outside, Britt?”

  The guy’s name was Britt? Well, there you go. With a name like that, it was no wonder he was such an asshole. It was like his parents had been planning for it since his birth. Either that or they knew there was no hope for the guy so they might as well accept the inevitable.

  “What?” Britt scowled, and I hated to say it, but the dark look only added to his appeal.

  “You heard me. Just wait outside, and I’ll be right out.”

  “Whatever, man. If you want to get tattooed by a bunch of queers, I’m not gonna stop you.”

  Obviously, Britt didn’t know much about the tattoo process. Standard procedure was that one guy tattooed another. Frat Boy Number Two wasn’t going to be tattooed
by a bunch of queers, just one.

  X took another step forward, but it wasn’t necessary. Britt had already turned his back on us and was stalking out the building in a huff that would do any queen proud. We all waited until he left before turning our attention back to Frat Boy Number Two.

  “Do you have an appointment?” Damian asked.

  Frat Boy Number Two looked startled. “Did I need one? I thought you guys took walk-ins.”

  “We do if we have an available artist.”

  “Do you?”

  X and I exchanged glances. We were both free. Afternoons were like that. A walk in or two would trickle in, and there were a few appointments, but it was mostly quiet. It was the evenings that we did the most business. The later it got, the busier we were.

  We’d talked about shortening the shop hours, but we never did. We didn’t have a reason for keeping our hours the way they were other than we were creatures of habit. It wasn’t like we would lose a lot of money if we opened later.

  From the way X was looking at me, I could tell he did not want to do the guy’s tattoo. I had to give it to the guy though. He had to know neither of us wanted to do the work, but he stood there without flinching. If it was me getting the freeze, I would have already been out the door with both middle fingers raised as I went.

  “I can help you out,” I finally gave in. “Come on back and we can talk about what you want.”

  When I turned and headed toward my station, Frat Boy Number Two followed. X stayed up front with Damian while Flynn kept right on tattooing the chick in his chair. I almost laughed at the goo-goo eyes she was giving him.

  Flynn was pretty hot if you were into that type, which I wasn’t since the guy was like another brother to me. He was too big too. At an even six feet, he wasn’t as tall as me or X, but he was a wall of ink. Flynn kept his dark hair buzzed and his eyes were an equally dark brown.

  So yeah, I could see why the woman he was tattooing was looking at him with stars in her eyes. Not that it was going to do her any good.

  Besides the fact that she didn’t have the right plumbing, Flynn didn’t date. In the few years I had known him, I’d never even seen him with a hookup let alone in an actual relationship. I sometimes wondered if he was ace, but I’d never asked. It wasn’t my business. If he wanted me to know, he would tell me.

  At my station, I gestured to the padded chair. “Have a seat,” I said, and the guy dropped down. “What’s your name, man?”

  “Dylan,” he answered and held out his hand.

  I barely kept from rolling my eyes as I gave his hand a quick shake. Of course the guy’s name was Dylan. It went with his whole obnoxious frat boy image.

  “My name’s Heath. You know what you want?”

  “Yeah, I want to get an acoustic guitar with musical notes around it but not by themselves. On a scale, if that makes sense.”

  It made a hell of a lot more sense than some of the things people had asked for. Honest to God, I got actual requests along the lines of ‘Could you draw that one guy from that movie that came out a couple of years ago? I can’t remember the name of the movie, but it was really popular so you probably know it’.

  As eye-roll inducing as those requests were, I always did my best to help them out. I tried to pry more specific information out of them. Sometimes it worked. Most of the time, it didn’t. Thank God for smart phones since it usually took a net search to figure out what the fuck they were talking about.

  Dylan reached into his pocket and pulled out an actual photo. I didn’t know people still took those anymore. I thought we’d all moved on from printed pictures when they put cameras in cell phones.

  “Do you think you could draw this exact guitar?” Dylan held the photo in my direction.

  I took the picture and looked it over. The woman in the photo was sitting cross legged on the ground with a guitar across her lap. Judging from the clothes she wore, I didn’t think it was a recent photo, but it was in good condition. Whoever had taken the picture had caught her mid-strum. There was a reverent look on her face as she looked at the guitar.

  I knew that look. I wore it every time I did a tattoo.

  “You just want the guitar and not the woman?”

  “Yeah.”

  That was good. I could do portraits, but it wasn’t my thing. My brother was the portrait specialist.

  “Where were you thinking about putting it?”

  “On my right shoulder.”

  “How big do you want it?”

  Dylan shrugged. “I don’t know. Average size I guess. I don’t want it to take up my whole back, but I want people to look at it and be able to see what it is.”

  I could work with that.

  “You want it 3D?”

  Dylan’s eyes popped wide. “You can do that?”

  I wouldn’t have offered if I couldn’t, but I let it go. “If that’s what you want.”

  “Does it cost any extra?”

  “Nope, same price.”

  “Okay, then yeah, that would be cool.”

  I didn’t try to hold back my smirk. “Give me about an hour to draw something up, and if you like it, we can put it on you.”

  “Do you want me to wait, or should I come back?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  It was easier if they came back, but I always gave them the choice. Knowing the customer was just hanging around the lobby waiting for me to finish always made me feel pressured. And feeling pressured wasn’t the best for producing good work.

  “I’ll just come back if that’s okay.”

  “Yeah, man, I’ll see you soon.”

  We shook hands, and I walked him out. When I returned to my station, I got to work.

  It didn’t take long before I got lost in what I was doing. It happened every time I drew, whether it was a customer’s tattoo or something in my personal sketchbook.

  Drawing had always been a means of escape. Something I’d needed to do often growing up. My brother, Cooper, was the same way. I didn’t know where we got our artistic talent from. Neither of our parents had any talent beyond how much they could drink and still manage to stay upright.

  When I’d decided I wanted to be a tattoo artist, I hadn’t started out looking to become an expert in 3D tattoos. I kind of fell into it when the guy I’d apprenticed with offered to show me. Back then, it was still a new thing and something he was known for.

  The guy had offered to train both me and X, but X had passed. Said he preferred the purity of old school tattoos, but I was hooked from the first one I’d seen.

  I loved the look of 3D tattoos almost as much as I loved the reactions to them. There was something magical about the way the ink seemed to leap off the person’s skin, but it wasn’t just that. For some people, it was a way to restore their feelings of self-worth.

  Tattooing nipples on reconstructed breasts of cancer survivors had become popular since 3D tattoos gained momentum, and I loved doing it. When I’d first started doing it, I’d expected the women to be shy or nervous about showing me their changed bodies.

  I was wrong.

  Those women were survivors. They had been through so much that something like that was the least likely to bother them.

  There was no way to do justice to how it felt when a woman saw her tattooed nipples for the first time. The wonder on her face and the tears in her eyes as she marveled over how real they looked always made my day, no matter how many times I heard it. For those women who didn’t want nipples, I tattooed elaborate scenes over their chests that were just as rewarding for me as it was for them.

  It was what kept me going when my hands ached, when I was so tired I could barely keep my eyes open, or when I had to tattoo obnoxious frat boys.

  The tattoo I was currently drawing may have belonged to a frat boy, but there was a story there. This wasn’t some guy getting something he thought would look cool or impress his friends. It meant something, and I hoped I would find out.

  Listening to the stories was anot
her thing I liked about my job. Most people got tattoos that meant something to them. Some stories were sweet. Some were funny while others were heartbreaking. No matter the reason, all of them had meaning and it made me proud of what I did.

  The tinkling of the bell over the door was followed by Damian’s appearance at my station.

  “Looks good, man,” Damian said, glancing at the drawing I was just finishing up.

  “Thanks.”

  “You done?”

  “Yeah, just finished.”

  “Good timing. Dude just got back, and he came alone this time.”

  That was probably for the best. It would be a shame if Britt’s homophobic rants ended up costing Dylan his tattoo.

  Over the years, I was sure I’d inked my share of homophobes. It wasn’t like we asked upfront if people were okay getting tattooed by a gay guy. If someone happened to make their hate filled views known before we put the ink down, that was a different story. Honestly, it was rare that we refused to tattoo someone for that reason, but it had happened.

  X had once stopped a guy’s ink midway through because he’d started bitching about gay marriage being legal. Of course, he’d been a little more colorful in his rant. When X stood up and peeled off his gloves and told the guy to get the fuck out, the guy hadn’t been too happy. Naturally, there had been a bunch of posturing, but he’d backed off when he found out X was gay. Said he didn’t want to be tattooed by a fag.

  Not the brightest thing to say in a shop full of artists who liked dick, which was why he barely escaped without getting a beat down. The guy had threatened to sue, but we never saw him again.

  “Want me to bring your customer back?” Damian asked.

  “Yeah, thanks, man.”

  Damian was gone and back in less than a minute with Dylan trailing behind him.

  “Thanks, D,” I said as he turned and headed back to the front counter.

  Damian didn’t acknowledge the thanks, but he never did. No matter which of us thanked him. The way he saw it, he was just doing his job.

  “Here’s what I came up with,” I said, handing Dylan the sketch I’d done.