I want to be covered in ink.

When I arrive graveside, I want to be covered in tattoos. I love them. I’m nearly obsessed. I’ve been stockpiling tattoo ideas for years and I am now in my forties and I have a measly total of three. A fairy (in outline only) on my left shoulder blade, a triquetra with my daughter’s name beneath it on my right wrist, and a matching one with my son’s name on my left. My shoulder was done when I was twenty and the pair of triquetras was done when I was thirty. I have tons of ideas and lots of blank canvas but I have a real problem spending money on myself. I don’t know why. I have no problem blowing money on everyone around me but when I comes to doing for myself, I am horrible. I was supposed to get a tattoo the last four times I’ve taken a trip out to the west coast and every time, I find a reason not to bother with it. It’s not the pain. That doesn’t bother me at all. It’s all about the money.

If I could shut that anxious part of my brain down, I would start with a neck tattoo. I want a black and white image of Medusa’s face on the front of my neck with her snakes all around her. I have a design saved but I want to have the artist alter it. Half of her face will be painted like a skull à la the design of Shantel Tessier’s book The Ritual.

The skull side of Medusa’s face will lead on into a full arm sleeve that is all bookish themed. I have no idea what how it would all be pieced together but I have started a whole wish list of elements I want to include:

✦ “always” and the Deathly Hallows symbol. I know, I know, we’re supposed to hate J.K. Rowling now because she’s decided to die on the gender argument hill for some reason I will never understand. The bitch is worth more money than you or I could even comprehend and feels the need to make herself the world’s biggest asshole. Like, lady, you’re doing uber-rich wrong. Find a better way to spend your time. Anyway, I truly do understand why people have such a problem with her and I get that. However, I won’t sit here and pretend that I don’t still love the Harry Potter series down to my pinky toes. And it doesn’t matter how many times I read the series or watch the movies, the moment Snape says, “Always,”, duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuude, I die. To this day, the series remains one of the best long-form stories I’ve ever read and the movies were a beautiful compliment to the books.

✦ “love is beneath us.“ This is a quote from the book That Sik Luv by Jescie Hall. It’s a dark romance novel with one of the craziest love stories I’ve ever read. I’ve thought about that story countless times since the last time I read the book. Their love is haunting, brutal, and breathtaking all rolled into one, and to say I love you to each other isn’t accurate. It isn’t big enough or deep enough. So, instead, they say love is beneath us. I don’t know whether to be terrified to my core or green green GREEN with jealousy. I never understood what people meant when they would say that book lives rent-free in my head until I read That Sik Luv.

✦ My own L.O.R.D.S. design. I’ve been thinking about this since my first leap down the rabbit hole that is the L.O.R.D.S. world. With every new book that comes out, I’ve added aspects to the design idea. It’s a spade for the Spade Brothers at Carnage. Inside it is the cathedral where the Lords and Ladies take their vows. Over that is the L.O.R.D.S. brand with chains laid atop the three bars. And in the stem is the spade is the triangle brand for Blackout. Below are some of the pieces I created for the design. I’m not going to post the final because I’m creating a collection to submit to Shantel and her team for licensing. Once I know the decision one way or the other on that, I will share the finalized L.O.R.D.S. designs with you.

✦ The number 217. It’s the number of the haunted room in The Shining by Stephen King. The book, not the movie. I’ve been reading Stephen King since I was twelve years old. I was once sent to the school principal’s office for bringing The Stand to school for a week-long read in. My mom was the one who gave me the okay to read it so they didn’t win that round. After that, I burned through every title I could get my hands on. Luckily, my mom bought almost every new release he had so I didn’t have to fill a ton of gaps. I have too many favorites on his bookshelf to pick just one. And I love the man’s short stories. Dolan’s Cadillac is (*insert chef’s kiss here*). If you’ve never read any of his anthologies, my favorites were Four Past Midnight and Nightmares and Dreamscapes. There are too many iconic pieces of imagery that could represent his books and since the hotel that inspired The Overlook Hotel (The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado) is on my bucket list of places to see, the haunted room number is what I chose.

✦ The masks of the Four Horsemen. This super-fun pack of psychos are the men of the Devil’s Night series by Penelope Douglas. Michael Crist, Kai Mori, Damon Torrance, and Will Grayson. Devil’s Night is a dark romance series with a spectacular thriller storyline that carries throughout the whole series. This was a story that kept me in a iron grip chokehold the whole way through. Michael and Will’s masks might be the only color I get in the whole sleeve.

✦ An hourglass. This one is for Brutal Vows by J.T. Geissinger. It should actually be a black widow spider but I’m robbing the hour glass from the spider’s back instead because spiders freak me out. I can’t imagine having one tattooed on my skin. Quinn (a.k.a. Spider) and Reyna (a.k.a. Viper or Black Widow) have an epic love story. He’s broken from a truly fucked up past in the gangland world of Ireland and she survived fourteen years being brutalized at the hands of a mafioso monster. When they meet, they’ve both lost hope in the whole idea of love and they find it again in each other. Their story is hilarious and heartbreaking and just perfection.

✦ “Are you ruined?“ So, I don’t read a ton of reverse harem. It’s nothing against the genre, it’s just that most of the stories have fallen very flat for me. The heroine usually comes across as weak or TSTL with men who might as well be Xerox copies of one another. Then I discovered the author Eva Ashwood and her series Dirty Broken Savages. The FMC in that series is River Simone and she is damaged with a backbone made of solid fucking steel. Over the course of the four-book series, a few events happen that bring her right up to the edge of being utterly broken. In those moments Gage (the more dominant of her four men) reminds her that she’s a badass fucking warrior and then asks her a simple question to pull her back from the precipice. “Are you ruined?” Since her answer has always been no, the moment a yes falls from her lips, holy fucking shit pops, you guys. The tears I cry every time I read the series! 😭😭😭😭😭😭 The question is a reminder that no matter what you’ve been through or how hopeless you feel in the moment, if you’re still vertical and breathing, you are not ruined. You can go on.

Holly leaves and tree branch-y vines in the negative space for The Wren in the Holly Library by K.A. Linde because I loved that book so, so much. Crossbones for Cat and Bones from the Night Huntress series by Jeaniene Frost because they’re one of the best couples ever written. A piece on the shoulder that looks like a metal armor plate shaped like a snarling bat with its wings spread. That bat armor piece would be for the Force of Nature series by Amber Lynn Natusch. #TeamMerc, baby. ISWIS and I’ll fight a bitch over it. An apple, which, being in grayscale, would represent The Giver by Lois Lowry. That was the first book that ever made me cry while reading. A coin stamped with ‘MC’ in fancy typeface for The Count of Monte Cristo because that’s the best revenge story ever. Vampire teeth puncture marks for Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series (this would be a great place for a splash of red too!). I could keep going all day.

And of course, my own books would need to be represented. I want a black-eyed demon face for the Hellfire series. For my Executioner series, I want a set of wolf claw marks and I want the symbols I created for Jamie’s spelled hunter tattoos (those would be on my fingers). I also would get the scythe symbol from the top of the trinket box in my The Vampire Diaries novella Nightshade.

What about you? What tattoo do you want?
Drop your answer in the comments.

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