"...and your stuff really is incredible," she finishes, like I didn't even say anything. "I can't believe you're just an apprentice, everything in that book looks amazing!"
She's definitely an amateur, even if her praise strokes my ego the way it likes to be stroked. She doesn't know what to look for in a tattoo to judge it as worth anything, so hearing her gush over it is only semi-rewarding. But for reasons I'm not ready to examine, I decide to push the subject.
"What do you know about it?" I smirk, sitting down on the client sofa and opening the book she was talking about. "How can you tell a tattoo's good or not? Even shitty tattoos look good to the untrained eye."
She pauses on her way to plugging in the vacuum, weighing what I said, and nods. "Yeah, I guess you're right. But...this one right here..."
She doesn't sit down beside me, just stands over me and flips through the pages of my old sketches, then points to one. It's a portrait; some guy came in wanting his girlfriend's face on his bicep. Portraits are crazy hard by themselves, but in a place like a bicep, rounded and hard in some places, soft in others, it was easily one of the hardest tattoos I ever did. Kakashi monitored the whole time but I pulled it off somehow. It's one of the tattoos I'm proudest of, besides my sleeves.
"It's amazing," Sakura says. "You got everything right. It's like I'm looking at a black-and-white photo."
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Okay, so she's got good taste.
"I like your sleeves," she adds, gesturing to my arms. Her eyes trace the ink patterns almost enviously. "Did you design them yourself?"
"I did them myself," I correct her, more than a little smug. Not saying I'm under her spell like the rest of our classmates, but the hottest girl at school is fawning all over my work and it's hard not to let it go to my head.
"Really? You're ambidextrous?"
"Hn. Nah." Just that fucking GOOD.
"Well that's arrogant, then," she says flatly, returning to her vacuum.
"What do you mean, arrogant?" I snap. Who is she to snark at me like that?
"I mean, you just picked up a needle and started drawing on yourself?" She rolls her eyes, plugs in the vacuum, turns it on. The noise grates on my nerves, but not nearly as much as the disapproving expression on her face, like she knows so much better than me.
"Get a tattoo, baby, then you can tell me what's what," I tell her, and I'm shocked, shocked at the words coming out of my mouth. Sure, every other guy who works here calls the chicks that come in here petnames, harmless ones like 'baby' or 'sweetheart' or 'honey,' but I've never called anybody anything but their given name. Ever.
This is what freaks me out about Sakura. I've known the girl for a handful of days, spoken to her three times in my life, but already she's becoming an exception.
