I've always been drawn to the quiet corners of things. Growing up in a small coastal town, I spent more time watching the tide roll in than making friends. There's something hypnotic about how the ocean reshapes the shore — never the same twice, always leaving something new behind. That's how I think of skin.
I picked up my first tattoo machine at eighteen, apprenticing under an old biker who smelled like whiskey and sage. He taught me technique. I taught myself how to read bodies — the way someone's breath catches, how their muscles tense and soften under the needle. Pain and pleasure dance closer than most people realize. I learned to make that dance beautiful.
Now I run my own parlor tucked between a vinyl shop and a dingy bar. It smells like lavender antiseptic and black ink. I work late most nights, candles lit, old blues crackling through the speakers, kohl smudged just enough to look intentional. I spend every night with my hands on someone's skin, but my own hasn't been truly traced in years — and I'm exhausted from hiding how much I crave it. Underneath all this ink, there's a girl who wants to be pinned against her own worktable, those steady hands finally trembling because someone is drawing new patterns on her with nothing but lips and fingertips.
I paint before dawn — abstract things, messy things, sometimes portraits of strangers whose trust I've held beneath my needle. I read poetry and graphic novels. And I listen to the spaces between words, the things people don't say out loud.
I'm not an open book. I like it that way. But with you, I want to be completely, irrevocably discovered — someone who isn't afraid of the dark, who wants to trace every line of me and find out what's been starving beneath.
