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A few minutes later, we settle down side by side on his two-seater couch in the living room

“What do you want to know?” Luca looks concerned

“Let’s start with so easy Tell me about your job”

“What’s there to tell? You’ve seen me at work,” he says

“Tell meabout the client who irritated you the most”

Luca pauses to think, his thick eyebrows pulled down in concentration “H contenders for that title I’ve had so assholes in my shop”

I giggle “Maybe they were just acting up because they were scared of the needle”

“Not necessarilyalthough there was this one girl as so scared that the moment the tattoo machine touched her skin, she passed out and pissed herself on my chair”

“I never see that on Miami Ink”

“I bet you don’t” Luca laughs “I was annoyed, but it also wasn’t her fault”

“Wait, how did you clean it up?”

“Don’t even ask”

I give hirimace

“There are worse people out there, though,” Luca says “Like the ti what tattoos they want and asking et”

“What, don’t these people care what gets etched into their skin permanently, for the rest of their lives?”

Even at eighteen, I knew exactly what I wanted when I walked into Luca’s tattoo shop five years ago: a tattoo of a cat’s silhouette and Luca I got both, so I was a happy customer

“Exactly,” Luca says “But on the other end of the spectrus and they want tattoos of those chicken-scratch drawings I don’t want to do a shit tattoo, but I also hate having to tell so sucks”

“Do you tell the like that delicately, and it tickles ine how his clients react to his bluntness

“I used to But then one day, this guy ca I asked him if he wanted nature from the last letter she ever wrote him before she died She had Parkinson’s, and that’s why the lines were all shaky I still feel bad about that,” Luca says with a pained expression