Inked Armor (Punk Niall)

Chapter 10

I could feel the pounding of my heart as Niall stared back at me, a look of familiar longing that I knew all too well. I couldn’t hear the people walking right by us, or see anything but the beautiful boy looking right back at me, the only thing that really mattered were the words that Niall had spoken to me. So incredible and amazing to my ears that I wanted to record them down, on a journal or on my skin, I wanted to remember it forever.

It stunned me at first, how opposite Niall’s reaction was when I expected him to lose any interest in me whatsoever, not gain it. It took me a second to realize that it was all real and not just another dream that would leave me hopeless. I didn’t want to believe it but at the same time had no trouble accepting it.

After a while, Niall took my hand in his warm one and helped me brush myself off, saying things I don’t remember because I was too distracted by the tingling vibrations that coursed between our intertwined hands and I never wanted it to end. Never in a million years.

With short conversation he walked me back to my flat (abandoning our vehicles, we could get them back later. Nothing mattered right now) and talked to me like we’d known each other for years, asking me questions and getting to know me. They were basic; where I grew up and what my hobbies were, but we never got into a deeper discussion than that. That could always be deliberated further down the road, if there was a possibility of this thing going that far. But what exactly was this? Too early to tell.

I asked Niall about his tattoos and piercings, why he’d gotten them or what their symbolism was. This question seemed to tug something deep within him, because he looked away and allowed his voice to become softer as well as his eyes.

“No reason, just thought it would be fun, make me look more unique.” He shrugged, turning the topic around and discussing something else. I took a mental note on how he said ‘unique’ instead of ‘cool’. It meant that he wasn’t intending to go about what everyone else thought was acceptable, but rather what he himself wanted to do. To me, that was admirable.

It was then that I decided to take a closer look at his inked skin, the armor he was unable to remove. I never really looked very closely at it, just the few times that I caught the ones on his hands and wrists, which were few. I guessed that he might have around ten tattoos total, not too much.

My eyes scanned over the four-leaf-clover between his thumb and forefinger, the barcode tattoo embedded into his right wrist that read a string of numbers “4988-17809”, the words written in cursive on his left forearm “Sometimes when you fall, you learn to fly”, and the small outline of a bird traced into the pink skin on the back of his neck.

Those were the only three that were visible to me since Niall was covered up from the cold weather, and I cursed the fact that it was winter and wished to see every line of ink drawn into his skin. I wanted to see him at his most exposed; it was a thought that opened up a newer, more provocative part of my mind and liberated my innocence. It was foreign and bizarre and eccentric and I liked it.

I knew that his flesh could tell me more stories than his mouth, because that’s what tattoos are. A metaphor of your life that only you know the true meaning of and will stay with you for the rest of your existence, a diary of secrets and silent journeys taken alone or together.

That’s the thing, it’s different for everyone. Each page you turn is a different story, different journey, different tragedy, nothing is the same.

I never even imagined of getting a tattoo. They were too permanent, and I didn’t want to have the courage to get one and then regret it a week later. It would have to be something so meaningful to me that I would look at it every day and say ‘yeah, it’s perfect’ without an ounce of doubt in my mind.