Cubic Zirconia

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Pia Malone was on a mission.

She strode purposefully through the school hallway, though the effect was dampened somewhat by the fact that some people didn't notice her coming and she had to sort of awkwardly side-step them and that kind of ruined the whole "purposeful and powerful" image, but anyway. Mission.

The question had been bouncing around in the back of her head for a while, and she'd finally made up her mind to seek out an expert. Hopefully there would be less seeking and more expertise involved, but she didn't expect to be searching for very long given what she knew about him.

Pia made her way into the cafeteria and sure enough, it wasn't long before she spied her target. She bounced on over and wow okay, he was taller sitting down than she was standing up. This guy was bruising her ego before they'd even said a word to each other.

"Hey." It came out a little squeaky, bringing a flush to her face, and she quickly cleared her throat and tried again. "Hey, um. You're the tattoo guy, right?"

[Latin For Dragula]

Vahka was used to lunch being a solitary affair. People tended to avoid him in general, and at lunchtime they gave his table a wide berth. Usually he'd pick at his food while working on some sketches or studying a bit for his weaker classes. The conversations around him registered as a sort of calming, buzzing white noise. It was familiar.

So he was a little surprised when the diminutive girl snuck up on him and started asking about his tattoos. He had to process for a second to make sure she was talking to him and that he'd gotten her question right. After a ponderous pause, he nodded down to the calligrams on his arms.

"Yep, that's about the size of it. What's on your mind?"

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"I, umm... I think I maybe wanna get a tattoo and I've got some questions? If that's okay?" Pia clasped her hands behind her back and rocked on the balls of her feet. He didn't seem irritated that she'd interrupted him, so that was good.

She nudged a nearby chair with the toe of one sneaker. "Is it cool if I sit down? If I'm not bothering ya or anything, I mean."

Well he seemed nice at least. Vahka, wasn't it? She'd heard about him from one of the guys on the wrestling team whose dad had dragged him to watch some battle reenactment. Big guy, tattoos, made armor or something.

It all sounded pretty cool.

[Latin For Dragula]

A grin spread across his face when she mentioned wanting ink. "Sure thing, 's no bother. I'm still kinda startin' out but I can point ya in the right direction if there's somethin' I can't answer."

He scooted back a bit to give her some space to sit. "What kind of tat are you looking for?" he inquired. "Got an idea for design, color, placement...?"

The generalities were the best to get out of the way first. It gave a good scope of how much of an undertaking the project would be, and how the client was going to be to work with. He didn't really know this girl, so that'd be pretty important. The gears in his mind turned to try and pull her name out of dozens of classroom roll-calls as he waited for her response.

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Pia plopped down in the seat next to him, all apprehension gone now. "I kind of have some ideas, but I'm not one hundred percent, ya know? Nobody in my family's got one so I wasn't sure what would be good to go for."

She pondered for a moment. "I'm thinkin' probably the back of my shoulders or neck, or maybe just one shoulder. And um... probably pink for the color. Pink and black."

She twisted around in her seat and patted the nape of her neck, right at the top of her spine. "Probably here? And then along my shoulder."

[Latin For Dragula]

Fingers instinctively traced along her neck as Vahka examined the potential canvas. Pia. That's her name, he thought as he examined the freckled skin under her ginger hair. "Hmm..." he hummed thoughtfully, brushing down across he shoulder and nodding as he went. "Yeah, those colors suit ya. Especially the pink, complements yer natural tone.

"Now, the real challenge is how big ya want it to be. Something on just this spot here on your neck, we can probably knock that out in an afternoon and it won't cost too much if you keep it to just two colors with a simpleish design. But if you wanna go bigger, say..." Digits moved down across her shoulder in increments, "...here, or here, it gets more complicated, especially if..." His fingers moved down across her back under her shoulders. "...ya want somethin' wide like that. The whole shoulder, or both of 'em, is gonna take at least five sessions if ya want it detailed and done right, I'd say, and cost a pretty decent amount."

He unconsciously kept his hands against her shoulders as he continued to scan along her neck line, lost in appraisal and possible patterns.

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Pia bit her lower lip, trying to stifle her ticklish giggles as Vahka's hands brushed over her neck. "Umm, can you give me a guesstimate for, say..." She reached up and moved his hands back up a bit. "This size? Or about the same size, but with one whole shoulder instead of across both?"

"Two colors would probably be good to stick with, yeah. I could probably draw what I want it to look like, if you want."

She tapped her fingers against her knees. Five tattoo sessions... It'd have to be during a break or something if it was going to take that long. She wasn't keen on going to practice matches with fresh tattoo wounds.

[Latin For Dragula]

"Rough estimate for two colors on that size? Unless you get real intricate, I can't see it takin' more than an hour and a half, two hours tops."

One of his hands drifted back up and rubbed his thin beard thoughtfully. "Yeah. Ronnie could probably knock somethin' like that out in an afternoon. I'd say that'd probably run you somewhere between two hundred, three hundred dollars."

He eased back away from her as he worked it out in his head. " 'course, the main thing ya need to think about time-wise ain't how long it'll take to ink, but how long it'll take to heal. A shoulder tat like that might take a month if yer body's not real quick on the draw, y'know?" He winced at the memory of his sleeves patching up. He was a pretty quick healer by average standards, but it wasn't really safe to work on them again until a month after the last session, spacing the pain and inconvenience out for awhile longer than he'd hoped. It was a mistake Ronnie'd taught him to avoid the hard way, and he passed it on whenever he could.

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"Mm, well, I'm pretty good on the healing front. D'you think I'd be able to get through wrestling practice after a couple weeks?" A couple hours and a few hundred dollars wasn't a big deal, but having to sit out for a month or more wasn't appealing.

Pia swiveled around in her chair to face Vahka again. "Oh also, do words cost extra? Like, if there's writing included in the design? Not a whole bunch, just a couple words. I wanna... I'd like to have 'Pink Diamond' right underneath the picture."

She knew that her face was starting to get red, and she cleared her throat a bit. It might have been silly, but saying her wrestling persona's name out loud to someone for the first time felt almost uncomfortably personal.

[Latin For Dragula]

Vahka chuckled at Pia's declaration. "Wrestlin', yeah? I bet you're pretty good at healin' at this point, then. After a couple weeks you should be able to hop back on the mat, but make sure to keep your shoulder out of the sun for at least a month. No beach-side death-matches, okay?"

He tapped his arms as she mentioned wanting lettering. "Trade secret? These are both all words. Lettering and inking run the same at our place, Ronnie and the rest charge by the hour. Something like that shouldn't take too long though, just straight lettering is the easy part."

The chair creaked, straining to hold him up as he leaned back. This seemed like light-hearted enough work that it was okay to probe a little bit. "Mind if I ask what it means? The whole 'Pink Diamond' and design thing? Hearin' the stories behind tat ideas is fascinatin' to me."

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"Ah..." Pia squeezed her knees a little nervously. "Well, I wanna go into professional wrestling sometime after graduating, and uh... Well, Pink Diamond is gonna be my 'stage name'." She grinned a bit. "Kind of the whole 'I'm cute, but I can still kick your ass' kinda thing, ya know?"

She inclined her head towards Vahka's arm. "What's the story behind yours?"

[Latin For Dragula]

"Heh. I'd buy it. You've got the first part down and from what I hear you're backin' up the second too."

He was remembering more about her as they talked. Word around was that she was a pretty decent wrestler. It made understanding where she was going with the tattoo a little easier.

It also meant he understood the context for talking about his better. He wasn't exactly shy about the details, but going from light-hearted shit like this to his was always awkward. Might as well go in on it. "Mine's a heritage thing. My dad's a Chechen refugee, and I grew up with a lot of respect for what him, my granddad, and my great granddad went through so I could be here. Both crows are kind of a word picture made out of their names. There was this old belief from Islam in their community that birds represent a soul's journey to God, so I like to think it's sort like I'm carryin' 'em with me on my own way, y'know?"

There was a brief pause before a coy smirk broke out on his face. "All that, plus they look badass. That's a pretty big part of it too."