JLK
The first tattoo he saw on me was my wrist tattoo—two hands pinky promising. He held my hand and stared at the ink in my skin for a long time that night. His thumb would come up and occasionally brush over my inner wrist. I always wondered why he had this reaction when he saw my tattoos. Though he had none himself, several of his friends had some, one had several hand tattoos that can be seen plain as day. But he always looked at my inked skin with revere.
The first time he saw my back was in the summer. We were going swimming with his friends. I was lifting my swim cover over my head when I heard him let out a sound somewhere between a sigh and a gasp of excitement; almost like he was relieved yet excited to see a tattoo on my body that he had never seen before. I turned around to see him with an adorable smile on his face, his eyes wide. He walked forward, placing his hands on me, turning my back towards him again. I still had my arms in my swim cover, but I just stood still and let him gaze at my tattoo. His hand reached up to my back, but he stopped right before he touched my skin. His hand hovered over my shoulder blade, over the sunflower tattooed there. He looked at me in question; though he had just touched my shoulders to spin me around, he still wanted my consent to touch my tattoos. He always did this, even when he found out that the bad tattoo on my finger was in fact not just a pen line I drew on every day. He had held my hand a hundred times by that point, but when he found out that I had that shitty pen line permanently in my skin, he asked permission to touch my finger.
This time, I rolled my eyes and nodded to him that yes, my boyfriend of multiple months can touch my back tattoo. His hand brushed slowly down on the ink in my skin and I shivered. He did not raise his eyes from the sunflower, but I saw a smile spread across his lips from the corner of my eye. He traced each line of the black and grey ink and measured it with his hand as he placed his palm over the majority of the flower. We stood like that for a while as he touched my skin slowly, almost like he was trying to memorize every dot and line. He leaned his head down pressing a light kiss against the center of the sunflower and smiled again. As he lifted his head I heard him whisper under his breath, “내 해바라기.”