"Some people touch you once
and the bruise lives under your skin for years."
Three years ago.
The tattoo studio wasn't somewhere she meant to find. Not really.
Isla had taken the wrong turn after skipping class. Rain was in her hair, the kind that kisses instead of pours. She was seventeen, maybe eighteen—too heartbroken to care about details, too young to realize heartbreak doesn't always need a name.
She'd just ended something she thought was going to be forever.
And what do girls do when forever ends?
They look for something that will stay.
Something permanent.
The place was barely marked — Midnight Needle, etched in fading paint across a cracked glass window. No glowing sign. Just the soft buzz of a tattoo gun from somewhere inside and the low thrum of music that sounded like whiskey and stormlight.
She pushed the door open like she was trespassing into someone's story.
Inside, the scent hit her first — sandalwood, ink, faint leather, and something deeper. Like longing steeped into wood. It smelled the way she wanted to feel: permanent, haunted, warm.
A bearded man at the front desk raised his brows.
"First time?"
Isla nodded.
"Got a design?"
She held out a crumpled paper, wordlessly. A single word written in blue pen:
"Still."
He didn't ask questions. Just told her to take a seat, that the artist would be out soon.
So she did.
She sat in a dark leather chair that creaked when she breathed, surrounded by art on the walls — dragons, saints, demons, broken clocks, wild women with halos.
And then there was him.
She didn't see his face at first. Just caught a glance from the side — backlit by a dusty lamp in the corner, crouched over a page like it owed him answers.
Dark shirt rolled to the elbows. Fingers stained in ink. Pencil gliding in circles on a sketchpad like his mind wasn't here at all.
She didn't stare. Not then. But she felt him.
The way you feel a fire across a room before it even glows.
The tattooist—Leon, she learned—called her name. The boy didn't look up. Not even when she passed him. But she caught it—just for a second—his hand twitching slightly on the page, as if her name had pressed through his spine.
The tattoo didn't hurt as much as she thought it would.
It was placed just under her left ribs, over the skin that tensed when she laughed too hard or cried too long.
"Why here?"
Leon had asked.
"Because that's where I carry silence,"
she whispered.
He just nodded.
When she came back out, pulling her shirt down carefully over fresh ink and sealed wounds, the boy was still sketching. Still silent. But now she looked.
Just for a moment.
And he looked up.
Their eyes met like two verses from different poems. Like something in the air remembered them before they could.
He didn't smile.
Didn't look away.
But he saw her.
The kind of seeing that makes your stomach tense.
The kind that says: I don't know your story, but I've felt your pages under my skin.
She left a minute later, her coat clutched too tightly, the word "still" burning against her ribs.
But he didn't forget her.
His name was Kieran.
An apprentice back then. Mostly sketching, cleaning, learning in silence. But that day — she stayed with him.
Not in words.
In the way her eyes scanned the room like it wasn't real. In the way she flinched when someone called her name. In the way she pressed her palm to her own ribs after the needle touched her — not in pain, but in some quiet prayer for the ache to mean something.
That night, he sketched her face from memory. Three times.
One with her eyes closed. One where her mouth was slightly open like she was about to say something. And one—his favorite—where she was looking at him.
He didn't know her name. Not then.
Didn't need to.
He named the sketch "Still."
And tucked it in the back of his notebook like a secret no one had earned yet.
Over the years, he saw her twice more.
Once in the café across the street, reading a dog-eared book and sipping black coffee like it owed her penance. He didn't say anything. Just watched from a distance.
Once again near the river, talking to an older woman. Laughing. Her hair tied up, freckles across her nose like commas in a sentence he hadn't yet written.
Still, he didn't speak.
But he thought about her.
When he tattooed lyrics on strangers' backs.
When he kissed women who never stayed the night.
When he drew on napkins at 3am because her eyes haunted him like lullabies from another life.
He didn't know she'd become a poet.
She didn't know he had opened the studio she once walked into on a whim.
But fate has teeth, baby.
It circles.
It waits.
And one night, three years later, she stepped onto a tiny café stage — the same one she passed every Friday for a year — and read a poem that split the air like lightning.
And Kieran, sitting in the back with a coffee he hadn't touched and a sketchbook he hadn't opened—
Looked up.
"This is for the hands you never held,
And the kisses you only gave in dreams."
The room faded.
The lights dimmed.
And suddenly, it was three years ago.
That girl in the corner chair.
That word on her ribs.
That look in her eyes.
She didn't see him.
Not yet.
But she would.
Because this time, he wouldn't let her leave with just a word.
Some love stories don't begin when you meet.
They begin when you almost did.