The Blood Tattoo

The tattoo gun danced on Jenny's skin. Her stomach tingled as the needle did its magic on her.

She closed her eyes and bit her lip, feeding on the strange pain that also turned her on. She felt the needle go in and out and in again, depositing the sweet color under her skin. Making something of nothing. She did not want it to stop. Ever.

The needle stopped pricking her and she opened her eyes.

"What happened?" she asked her tattoo artist.

The tattoo artist, a bald man with tattoos up to his neck, took off his face mask and wiped his face with a towel. 

"I think we're done for the day. I can't concentrate anymore." He put away his tattoo gun and called out to his assistant to clean up Jenny's tattoo.

Jenny waited impatiently as the assistant girl worked on the tattoo and finally gave her a thumbs up to leave.

This was Jenny's 7th visit to the tattoo parlor in last 8 weeks. The tattoo she was going for was a complex design. She had drawn it herself after looking into ancient books of blood. The design was all figures with ancient words written in them. With the tattoo on her skin, Jenny felt close to the darkness that had called out to her from her dreams. The thought of what she was doing made her shiver from inside. Some nights when she was alone in her room, she traced the lines of her tattoo with her fingers and spoke the words that were inscribed in her skin and then spoke some more words that were not part of the tattoo, yet. Once the incantations were complete, she waited. And he appeared. 

He always came whenever she called and he came under the garb of night. His face was black and so were his clothes. He could've been the night, a figment of imagination, but she remembered the touch of his fingers. Warm fingers that touched the lines on her tattoo and murmured the words, as if unsure. And every night, the figure stopped, tracing the lines of the tattoo, shook his head sadly and broke away like ripples in a still lake. Every night she was disappointed. She just wanted that tattoo to be complete. She wanted the dark stranger to take her with him. To whatever dark places he came from. She was not afraid of him. She was never afraid. She knew once her tattoo was complete, he'd stay the night with her and she'd persuade him to take her to the dark lands. 

She cried herself to sleep at times. 

Her visits to the tattoo parlor became more frequent. She pressurized the tattoo artist to work on her even though her skin was bleeding and torn from the tattoo gun's abuse. She thought of the pain as a gift from her dark god. Finally, after ten weeks of agony, the tattoo was complete. When she left the tattoo shop, broke and broken, but happy, she knew that tonight her dark god will become her lover and he'd love her forever because that's what forever is. 

In her bedroom that night, she moved her fingers across her freshly wounded stomach, whispering the words of the incantation that will open the doors to portals from other other side.This time, the portal opened and there were two figures in the doorway. Silhouetted by the red light, they walked up into her room. More than seven feet tall, both of them were identical in shape and size. Their eyes burned with a black glow that sucked the light from the room and suddenly made the room chilly. None of them was her dark god. 

They walked up to her bed and one of figures raised a scabbed, calloused hand and grabbed her neck. It lifted her up from the bed by sheer force as her feet kicked empty air and her throat choked out plaintive cries. 

"Please, please," Jenny coughed out.

The other figure bent down to examine the tattoo on her stomach. It touched the tattoo and dark blood welled out from the lines of the tattoo. The characters in her skin burned with a sulphuric intensity. Only one character stood out from the circle of words and letters that made no sense to any human eye. The demonic examiner grinned like a shark that has spotted its prey.

"There is a mistake in the incantation. Yes, there is a mistake. Heh, heh."

The other figure increased the pressure on Jenny's neck till it snapped in its fist like a rotten branch. The tattoo on her stomach kept leaking blood as life slowly ebbed out of her. 

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Ok, there might be some conceptual mistakes because I've never gotten a tattoo, so take it with a grain of sale. I've artistic license n all.

Yeah, let's start again. Let's wipe the old slate clean and begin something new and awesome.