Fallout 4 One Shot
"Nice ink!" Piper leant over the back of the chair with her cigarette hanging loosely from her lips and admired that artwork that adorned your arm from shoulder to wrist. "Rare to see anything that clean these days, you're lucky if you can read what it says, never mind anything like this." She pulled slightly at the cuff of your short-sleeved shirt to catch a glimpse at the rest of it.
"They were a bit more readily available before the bombs dropped. Probably quite a lot more hygienic as well, can't be too steady a supply of clean tattooing equipment these days." Piper just shrugged and continued to lose herself in the artwork that had been forever embedded into your skin those many years ago.
"Weird." She ran her fingers over the ever so slightly raised edges, she leant closer and closer in until you could almost feel the heat radiating from the end of her cigarette before finally finding herself and putting herself back into reality. Reluctantly she pulled back from you and sat herself down in the seat opposite. "I never would have imagined you as being in a gang." She pulled the filter from her lips, blew a final and heavy gust of smoke into the air and stubbed the little that was left into the ashtray.
"A gang? You're definitely right about that, I was a suburban homemaker. I couldn't even confront somebody if they jumped in front of me in the checkout queue at the store and you bet your ass I was letting Susie talk about how uneven my lawn was at the home owners association meetings. Pfft, a gang. Is that all tattoos are now?" Piper nodded sadly. "Nobody just get's something because they think it looks pretty or they just... want to get it?"
"Sometimes, pretty rare though. Ninety-nine percent of the time though it's just another way to show your allegiance to whatever looting party you're a part of. What did you get yours for then?"
"Back when I got my work done, people got tattoos for all sorts of reasons." You cuffed your shirt sleeve up and under itself, fully revealing your covered arm. You scanned your eyes across, sometimes even you forgot what you had endured so much pain for. "I got... this one." Your finger darted to a large, greyscale rose that sat proudly just underneath the crevice of your elbow. "I got this one for my grandmother, she had a rosebush that sat in her garden, the biggest rosebush in the whole town. So when she died, I thought I should get something to remember her by."
"That's nice." She smiled, gently held your arm and with a new perspective gazed again upon it. "Maybe I'll get a few myself." Her eyes fell upon you with a veil of her past filling her mind. "I've got a few people to remember myself."
~*~
Written by Aaron.