Page 55 of Bleeding Hearts

We’re only about a twenty-minute drive from where they live, so I just hope Demi wants to stick mainly to the hotel this weekend so we don’t accidentally run into them.

I’m assuming she’ll have a pretty busy schedule anyway, which means I’ll be spending most of my days binge-watching a new TV show from the hotel room. It might sound boring, but it actually sounds kind of perfect to me.

I love my job. Creating art and inking it onto people is something I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of. But even I can admit that it’s nice to have a break once in a while.

After my remission, I enrolled in community college. It was all my grades were good enough for at that point.

I stayed for two years, getting my associate degree, and then that was about all the school I could handle.

My parents wanted me to transfer to a state school, get my bachelor’s, but I was tired of sitting in a classroom. I felt like with every day I stayed in Portland, I was betraying myself and the promise I made to live my life to the fullest.

So, much to my parents’ dismay, I took all the money I saved up working as a receptionist at my mom’s office over the past two years and decided to travel.

I bought cheap flights, stayed in cheap hotels, and traveled. I became something of an adrenaline junkie at the time, taking my promise to myself more seriously than ever.

I did things like skydiving, cliff jumping, shark diving, and zip-lining all around Europe.

Name it, and I probably did it.

I wandered around Europe for about three months, exploring different cities, trying new things, and sleeping with different women until I stumbled into a tattoo shop in Ireland.

There was a man named Declan, who I later found out was the owner, sitting up front in the pretty much empty waiting room sketching in a notebook. I looked over his shoulder at the sketch and immediately fell in love with it.

It was a geometric type design with a moth in the center of it. The shading on it was like nothing I’d ever seen before, so intricate and delicate but harsh at the same time.

I thought it was fucking incredible. So, I told him so, and he yelled at me. Told me to stop looking where I wasn’t welcome and to mind my own business.

Obviously, I won him over with my charm, and eventually, he agreed to ink the design on me. For double the normal price, although I didn’t know that at the time.

It was my first tattoo, and it’s still one of my favorites years later.

I stayed in Ireland for two weeks after that, obsessing over everything Declan drew and learning how to sketch my own pieces. Declan was surprised by what he called my natural talent for drawing, and honestly, so was I.

I’d always liked art but had never taken an interest in drawing or sketching before. Then all of a sudden, with one trip to Ireland, it sort of slapped me in the face.

It felt like I’d found what I was meant to be doing.

It’s weird when I think back now to the first time I met Demi. I had that same feeling, but in the sense that I was meant to know her.

She was put into my life at that moment for a reason and I knew I needed to hold on to her.

After those two weeks, I booked a flight home to Portland. Unfortunately, once I was home from traveling for so long, I felt smothered by my parents.

My mom hated the idea of me being a tattoo artist, even if she didn’t say it. She pretended to be supportive, but I could tell she wanted me to go back to school and do more.

This meant my dad went above and beyond to show his approval because if he could be better than her—beat her in something when it came to me—he’d do it.

It felt like everything I’d found in my time away was being diminished just by being home.

So, I left. Packed a bag, moved to Seattle, found an apartment, found Blackheart Ink, and in turn Damian King, who took me on for an apprenticeship.

Then, eventually, through it all, I found myself.

I’ve been working at Blackheart with King and Kaden ever since and like I said, I love it. After years of doing it, I’m still not tired of it.

When I first started, all I wanted to do was go, go, go. I barely let myself take a day off, always wanting to do more, do better.

But now, I’ve reached a point where it feels nice to have a break.

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