Only Temporary

There were moments when Vera felt it odd, that given her personality, this was one of the few times that she had ever even stepped into a Tattoo parlour, and the other handful of times she had never left with a single mark on her. In her youth, she had had a fascination with the idea of etching something into her skin that would always remain.

But that was before she was scarred, tattooed by God. That had, for the longest time, left her with an aversion to putting anything else to her skin.

Yet, as she walked passed the place today, there was just a curiosity that drove her to walk in.

Maybe adding something else to your skin wasn't so bad, if it meant something.

She just... had to figure out if anything meant anything to her.

Alice stopped in front of the parlor and watched a young man inside, getting what seemed to be his first tattoo. Automatically, her hand went to her right shoulder, where she knew the feather, the birds and those two words were.

Her first, and only, tattoo had been done on impulse, way back when she was only fifteen, nearly sixteen, during her 'rebel days'. She didn't regret it, but thinking about it, she felt like maybe she could have waited a bit more. One, two years. It wouldn't have changed anything, the meaning, the words, her thoughts. . . but tattoos were something permanent. Forever. One had to think a lot before doing it.

And she had thought, a great deal, about her second one. But, unlike the first, she wasn't one hundred percent sure of what she was getting, which was why she would usually, when she was in the city, stop by the shop and look at the drawings, the patterns, the words.

"What are you getting?" she asked the blonde in the shop, curious, after a while of just looking around.

Vera glanced over at the sound of a voice, looking around her to make sure they weren't speaking to someone else - not that it mattered all that much, Vera would have asserted herself into their conversation whether it was wanted or not, it was just the sort of person she was.

"To be honest, I don't know." She glanced down at one of the books she had started flipping through slowly and with little intent, "There's nothing that seems... right."

She sighed and glanced around her slowly, looking at one of the current customers - the boy the other girl had noticed - before turning back to the person she was talking to.

"I had something in mind, that I thought I might like to... honour, but nothing seems quite right." She gave a soft tinkling laugh, never one to get frustrated or discouraged easily, "Maybe that just means its best remembered just in my head. Who knows."