The noise the gun makes, anyway. And what I'm doing right now is stupid. Foolish. Arrogant beyond all belief, according to my brother, but if I listened to him, who knows where I would be?
Because I'm finishing a tattoo on my right arm. With my left hand.
Free-hand.
Itachi would kill me if he knew.
But he's out touring with his band right now. Akatsuki's doing really well, and how could they not, with my blessed, all-talented older brother headlining for them? (I'm not bitter, I swear.)
Just a little disillusioned, I guess.
There's always pain with tattoos. Anyone who says it doesn't hurt them is lying. Of course it fucking hurts, but that's not the point. The point is sticking it out till the end, through a process that takes hours and hours, a high threshold for pain, and all the fucking guts in the world. Because if you fuck it up, there's no way of hiding it, not when you wear the brand.
Doing it to yourself is even worse. You can't move. You can't adjust yourself. And it hurts like hell, but you're doing it to yourself, so you only have yourself to blame in the first place. Sort of this controlled kind of masochism, all for the sake of art.
And what I do? That ain't art.
I dip the needle in the ink again, turn the gun on. The outline of lightning bolts on my right arm is black and harsh and severe, the way I like my tattoos. Nothing frilly, nothing feminine, just fucking lightning. The harsh grinding vanishes into the background as I concentrate, filling in the outline all the way to my wrist.
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I glance at my reflection in the mirror, examine the outline from a different angle, and I'm arrogantly pleased with my work. As an apprentice, I'm not technically allowed to work on anyone without my mentor present, but Kakashi's pretty lenient when I want to draw all over myself. This, though, he might be pissed about; I'm using a lot of ink.
I'm Sasuke Uchiha. I go to Konoha Performing Arts Academy, studying guitar and musicianship, and I moonlight as a tattoo artist.
Go figure.
"That looks painful as shit," Naruto remarks on the way back to our dorms. He's pointing to my newly finished outline; the skin is inflamed and aggravated, bleeding a bit in some places where I drove the needle too hard, but all of it is practice, to help me get better. And it's painful, but I can deal with pain.
"Hn. Pussy," I tell him to start a needless argument.
Predictably, he rises to the bait.
"Who you callin a pussy, asshole? I let you tattoo my fucking stomach, didn't I?"
Naruto was my first client, so to speak. As in, we snuck into Kakashi's tattoo shop after hours last year when he wasn't there, and I tattooed a sick ass spiral on his stomach for practice. It looks badass as shit, though looking back on it, maybe I should've fucked it up on purpose. Just to give him something real to complain about.
