Rosekook Oneshot Collection

5. Tattoo

{soulmates au, tattoo artist au, fluff}

You're still a part of everything I do,
You're on my heart just like a tattoo.
⤝❁⤞

Graphic design was Jungkook's passion. He was one of the few kids who grew up knowing exactly what he wanted to do and did everything to ensure he reached that goal. The first gift he ever received was a sketchbook. And after he filled all 250 pages with random doodles and drawings, his parents decided to finally enroll him in art classes. It was there that his talents really developed, and he began to dream.

Now, as the lead graphic artist of one of Korea's biggest animation studios, and a casual tattoo artist on the side, he was living that dream. Two satisfying jobs, a loaded bank account, glowing reputation, luxurious house, and a ripped physique. To anyone else, it seemed like he had everything. And while that was mostly true, there was one piece of the puzzle that he had never found. Love.

In this day and age, it was supposed to an easy thing to find. Everyone was assigned one soulmate as soon as they were born. Throughout the years, as society advanced and magic became widely accepted in the modern world, the government had developed a method to help people find their perfect match. As soon as a new life entered the world, they were given a mark on their body. This mark could be anything as simple as a tiny dot on an arm, to a large, colourful design spread across a whole back. In order to find your soulmate, all you had to do was find the person with the same, identical, birthmark as you in the same location on your bodies.

Although most people made it their life mission to find their match, Jungkook was never actively seeking it out. For a long while, he was content with everything he had and the life he was paving for himself. He would engage in the occasional hookup here and there and would sometimes glance at people on the beach to see if they bore the same mark as him, but he never had time to really dwell on the fact that he had not found his soulmate.

It wasn't until recently, while attending a high school reunion, that it finally hit him. He was going to die alone.

All his friends had already found their one true love. Mingyu met his in grade one, for crying out loud. Bambam only found his last year. And Jaehyun met his girl in freshman year of college. While they spent their youth searching for their other halves (like all the other sane people in the world), Jungkook had been busy focusing on his art and career. He had used his hobbies to fill the absence of other types of love in his heart for so long that he had just gotten used to it.

Maybe it was the physical act of seeing everyone attend the celebration with dates while he arrived alone. Or maybe it was the way he saw them all look at each other with pure devotion that made him finally realize what the next step in his life had to be. Because despite achieving everything he had wanted at an early age, he had yet to feel completely whole. And after seeing how his friends had changed for the better after finding their soulmates, he decided it was time he put a little more effort in as well.

He had spent the past few months searching. He went on countless dates and hooked up with numerous different women in different parts of the world, but to no avail. He was starting to think no one had been cursed with the same star-shaped birthmark as his.

"I just think it's ridiculous how there's only one person out there for everyone. What if you live oceans apart?" Jungkook grumbled one morning as he rolled into the animation studio office with a fresh cup of steaming coffee in his hands. "Back in the early 2000's, no one had these marks and they had to find love all on their own."

Jungkook's co-worker and best friend, Jimin, rolled his eyes before snatching the coffee cup out of Jungkook's hands. "That was hundreds of years ago, Jungkook. Back then, they had to use dating apps and slept around so much, they created dozens of new sexually transmitted diseases." He paused to physically shiver in disgust. "Because of the soulmates initiative, divorce rates have dropped drastically, people are happier, families are more united – it's the best thing that's happened to the world since flying cars."