The tattoo parlor smelled like antiseptic and cigarette smoke, the kind of scent that clung to your clothes long after you’d left. The walls were covered in flash designs—dragons curling around limbs, delicate script coiled over collarbones, symbols whose meanings had been lost to time.
He sat in the chair, tracing the outline of a napkin doodle with his fingertips. The artist—a man with tired eyes and hands that had inked hundreds of stories into strangers’ skin—watched him with quiet patience.
“You sure about this?” the artist asked. Not as a warning, just a formality.
He nodded.
The buzzing of the needle started slow, a vibration that settled somewhere in his ribs before finding his skin. He exhaled, feeling the first sharp sting, the kind that made his body tense before surrendering to it.
It was small, the tattoo. Just a word. One only he would understand. He could have written it on paper, tucked it into the folds of an old book, whispered it to himself on sleepless nights. But paper tears, books are lost, voices fade.
Ink stays.
Some moments refuse to be forgotten. They surface in the middle of a crowded train station, in the scent of someone else’s cologne, in the sound of an old song playing through a café’s worn-out speakers. A name whispered in the dark. A streetlight flickering as you say goodbye. The ocean at 3 AM when there’s no one else around.
There were things he wished he could let go of. And then there were the things he never wanted to lose.
The tattoo was for the latter.
The needle moved in slow, steady strokes, pressing memory into skin. The past, distilled into something tangible. He thought about the people who had left, the places he could no longer return to. About the conversations that ended too soon and the ones that had dragged on long after they should have.
A tattoo isn’t a cure. It doesn’t fix anything. But it gives shape to something shapeless, weight to something that might otherwise slip away.
The artist wiped away the excess ink, tilted his head to examine the work. “That’ll hold,” he said simply.
He nodded again, staring down at the fresh mark on his ribs. His skin was raw, burning slightly, but beneath the sting, something had settled. Not closure. Not relief. Just a quiet understanding.
Some things are meant to be carried. Some things are meant to stay.
He pulled his shirt back on, paid in crumpled bills, stepped outside. The night air was cool against his skin, the city stretching out in front of him.
And somewhere beneath his clothes, beneath the layers of time and distance and everything unspoken—
A mark that whispered: I was here.
life 
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