Page 95 of Show Me How
“Finished? It’s not. I’ve still got to smooth out the edges of the letters and add more, I don’t know, dimension maybe?” I ramble, cheeks burning.
“No you don’t. This is perfect. It’s better like this than it would be if you spent more time trying to make it more clean-cut. I want to try a few different colours, though. What are you thinking?”
“You don’t have one you want already?”
“I want to hear what you think,” he says bluntly.
Pressing my lips together, I look around the studio, hoping I’ll find a hint as to which direction to take. It’s too dark, though. Besides the lights around the mirrors and the neon ones around the signs both he and Bryce have hung over their stations, there isn’t much colour at all. I’ve never really noticed before.
Shade strokes his fingers along the back of my knee, staring up at me. I swallow, not giving in to the distraction, regardless of whether he meant it to be something other than that. His touch is always a distraction. My body can’t handle it, especially when it’s so soft and honest. I short-circuit instead.
“It doesn’t have to match the inside of this place,” he says lowly, cupping my leg firmly now. “When you think of me and this place, what colour do you see?”
“Red.” It explodes out of me.
“Red it is, then.”
I cinch my brows. “You don’t have any other ideas? Just red?”
“Just red. And now that that’s decided, I want to show you something.”
“Alright . . .” I trail off.
He stands, returning to his towering height before pointing at the table by Bryce’s station. I follow as he goes to it and touches a small black printer.
“I’m going to teach you how to print stencils,” he announces, already reaching for something in a drawer beside us. “It’s not hard, but it’ll probably take you a few times to get the hang of it.”
I nod, my attention snagging on the confident way his hands move. He’s obviously done this a million times, but it’s still new to me—watching him do this side of the job. I’m used to only catching the actual tattooing part from the front desk, not what leads up to that.
“This fucking iPad that Bryce is so obsessed with does make it easier for this, but don’t tell her I said that,” he adds.
I crook a smile. “She does love it, doesn’t she?”
“I’ve always been a pencil-and-paper guy. Not sure why, but I just feel like I have more control that way. It’s not as easy to get everything printed off and stencilled, though, as much as I hate to admit it.” He sets the iPad on the desk, a new design replacing the Into The Shade logo that was just there. “When a design is on here, it’s easy to just print it off through the regular printer. This one here is a thermal printer, and we have to feed the regular paper through it with the tattoo paper to get the stencil.”
Leaning close to him, I take mental pictures of the black gloves he slips on and the label on the paper he’s grabbing. He slides it onto the table beside the printer and peels up the yellow sheet before ripping it off completely. The blue one that was hidden beneath it appears now, over top of a thin white one.
“We can’t just print off the design through one or the other?” I ask.
There’s not a fleck of judgment in his voice when he answers, “Nah, princess. In a perfect world, yeah. But for now, this is the way we do it.”
“Alright. So, we print the design off with the regular printer and then use it for this one.”
The black thermal printer doesn’t look any more complicated to use than an office one, so that’s a plus.
“That’s right. Can you print that design off?”
I grab the iPad and send it to the printer. It comes to life instantly with a clunk before starting to push the design out.
“I always thought you were just printing off the stencils when you did this,” I admit sheepishly.
Shade smooths a hand across my back as he reaches around me for the design. A breath slips from me, sounding too close to a moan for my liking.
“Not quite,” he murmurs. With the design in his hand, he clicks a few buttons on the thermal printer. The drawing is small on the paper, and he doesn’t hesitate before ripping the empty portion of the paper off and discarding it. “Now, we have to feed the tattoo paper and the design through the printer at the same time.”
“Okay.”
“The tattoo paper goes in like this, and the design like this with the black side down. Watch me.”
