Work Text:
_X_ Shitty and Lardo _X_
Shitty is one of those people who’s right in the middle of the mark spectrum. His body isn’t overrun with tattoos, but he’s got enough that when the blue stylized star that represents Bitty shows up on the inside of his elbow mere weeks after he meets the kid, it’s not at all a surprise.
Shitty’s biggest tattoo is Lardo’s purple dove, which stretches from the center of his upper chest to the point of his left shoulder. It’s wings spread up above his collar bone, making it practically impossible for him to hide it. Not that he would want to, anyway. It mirrors his teal feather that spans the entire length of her collar bone.
Lardo’s tattoo’s size is only rivaled slightly on his body by Jack’s crescent moon, which takes up a decent amount of the right side of his upper back.
Lardo has a few more marks than the average person. She doesn’t seem surprised at all any time a new one shows up. In fact, she gets pretty good about predicting when they’ll show up. She tells Ransom his is going to come in the day before it does, and knows the exact spot where it’s going to be.
But even under Shitty’s questioning she doesn’t talk about a lot of the tattoos she has from before her time as Samwell. She spends a great amount of time applying makeup to cover a few, and everyone quickly learns to just not ask about the green seashell on her upper arm.
_X_ Ransom and Holster _X_
Holster has a lot of tattoos. Like, hundreds of them. He’s actually been part of a scientific study before because of how easily he gets marked. He ended up with the yellow sun and purple lotus flower of the two doctors running it, as well as the marks of all the other subjects in the study.
Holster’s got a lot of random marks. Most he knows who they belong to, like the brown music note on his calf that belongs to the guy he sat next to in History his freshman year who let him borrow a pencil for an exam because he didn’t know it was a scantron and only had a pen. But there are quite a few that even Holster doesn’t know who they came from.
Holster finds that, like everyone, size does indicate how important the person is to him. It’s why his teammates and family’s marks are all significantly larger than the random ones. But even he is surprised when his largest mark comes in, taking up almost the entirety of the left side of his rib cage.
The crazy thing is, he doesn’t know who it belongs to at first. He’s just come to Samwell and he’s meeting all types of people. A tattoo this large has to be his Person—the one he’ll spend the rest of his life with, so Holster immediately tries to figure out who it is.
It’s almost heartbreaking when he discovers that the gigantic elephant belongs to Ransom and his own lion’s head is still nowhere on Ransom’s body. But Holster knows he’s quick to accept marks and others aren’t as willing to have a spot in their hearts and on their bodies.
Ransom is like Shitty, somewhere right in the middle of the spectrum. With the size of his mark on Holster’s side and how quickly they fit into each other’s lives, they expect Holster’s mark to show up on Ransom soon enough.
But it doesn’t come. They wait longer. They become a d-pair. They’re best friends. They move into the attic together. They start dating. They fall in love with each other. They become co-captains together.
And yet the tattoo still doesn’t come.
It’s not like Ransom isn’t someone who gets tattoos often. He’s got Bitty’s star tucked behind the back of his ear, Jack’s moon on his foot, and Lardo’s dove on his hip.
Holster won’t admit it, but he cries over it at least once a week their senior year. Ransom won’t admit it, but it causes him to go into a depression. They’re in love. They’re planning on moving to Boston together after graduation. Holster has already picked out the ring he wants to propose with. But the lack of Holster’s tattoo on Ransom’s body starts to drive a wedge between them.
The day after their graduation, Holster decides he doesn’t care that his mark still hasn’t come in. He loves Ransom. He wants to marry Ransom. And tattoo or not tattoo, he knows Ransom is it for him.
They sneak into Faber for one last skate—they’ve already kissed the ice—and Holster drops to one knee on the blue line, professing his undying love. Ransom cries and decides he doesn’t care Holster’s that mark isn’t on him either. They’re getting married, damn it.
They wake up the next morning naked in the bottom bunk in the attic, pressed completely against each other. It isn’t until Holster flips them and starts kissing down his fiancee’s neck that they notice it.
Holster’s lion is massive, even bigger than Ransom’s elephant, and takes up almost a quarter of Ransom’s torso. It’s presence alone is enough to have both of them sobbing with relief into each other’s shoulders. They’ve always been meant to be, and now they finally have the proof to back it up.
_X_ Jack _X_
It’s no surprise that Jack has very few marks on his body. Going into college, Jack has a grand total of three tattoos. His mother’s dark green heart on his wrist, his father’s dark blue four-point star on his shoulder, and Kent Parson’s yellow sunflower on his hip. By the time graduation comes around, he’s added two more in Lardo’s purple dove behind his ear and Shitty’s teal feather on his forearm.
Shitty’s was the first tattoo to show up on his body in over four years, and when it was closely followed up by Lardo’s less than a week later, it sent Jack into an anxiety-driven panic that worried everyone around him.
Jack just didn’t think he was ready for the type of commitment that came with having someone’s mark on his body. After all, the last one he got was Kent’s and look at how that turned out. To give someone that kind of power, publicly and permanently stamping their existence onto his skin, was terrifying.
Lardo was the one to calm him down, sneaking into his locked room by crawling out on the roof and climbing in through his window. She didn’t say much, just tucked herself around his curled up body and ran her fingers through his hair until he could breathe again. Shitty joined them later, effectively making a Jack-sandwich and doing all the talking for the three of them.
Jack understood, after that day, why both of their marks showed up on him.
Jack is amazed when he thinks about how many people bare his crescent moon on their skin, and how many of those people are so happy to have it. Sometimes he doesn’t understand why they accept it, to him it’s so boring and useless. But when he signs with the Falconers and Lardo posts a photo of them bearing their matching marks on Instagram with a long caption of how proud she is to be his friend and how much she loves him, it makes his heart soar.
By the time Bitty’s blue star appears, unmistakable in the center of his chest the day of his graduation, Jack is ready for it. He knows Bitty isn’t just another platonic mark, and that scares him a bit. But he’s done with hiding from loving and being loved. He’s made a lot of progress through his relationships with Shitty and Lardo, and is open to letting another person in.
Especially if that person is Bitty.
_X_ Bitty _X_
Bitty came to Samwell with few tattoos. But after just one semester, as he learns to be unapologetically himself, he starts to gain marks like crazy. His teammates are the largest, taking up prime real estate along his arms and back.
Jack’s moon shows up on his forearm, large and obvious, at the end of the hockey season. He passes it off as yet another teammate earning a spot on his skin, but Bitty knows this one means more to him than the others. He just doesn’t know it means something to Jack also until Jack is kissing him in the Haus.
_X_ Chowder _X_
Chowder is what the doctors call a Null. He doesn’t have any tattoos, and never will. It’s a hard pill to swallow at times, but Chowder’s accepted it. His mark still shows up on others, and being a Null doesn’t mean he’s incapable of building the same relationships—both platonic and romantic. It just means he has to be better at communication than others.
Chowder lets Lardo do an art project with him where she takes photos of him in just his boxers and then paints beautiful watercolors all over his body. She calls it “I May Be Different But I Am Not Broken” and wins a national art student award, including a huge scholarship.
He’s proud of her, and he’s grateful she’s painting people like him in a positive light.
_X_ Nursey and Dex _X_
Dex comes to Samwell with just one tattoo—his little sister’s princess crown in the middle of his upper back. The thing is, Dex just doesn’t let anyone in close enough to gain that honor. Not even his parents. His sister is the only one who he feels any comfort around, and she’s five.
That’s what makes meeting Nursey the very first day intimidating. He’s not Holster levels of marks, but he’s certainly well above average. He’s confident, which is the biggest thing Dex has a hard time accepting.
At first, Nursey sees Dex as a challenge. It’s why he pushes his buttons so often. He wants to understand the eighteen year old guy who has just one tattoo.
It takes a while—almost two whole years before Dex’s shamrock shows up on Nursey’s skin. Dex is shocked to find it’s so large, since most on most people it’s small and practically insignificant.
Insignificant like he is, his brain supplies.
But on Nursey it’s a generous size. So far, it’s the largest he has. The bright green stands out against Nursey’s dark skin tone, announcing it’s presence every time Nursey’s muscles shift under it.
The next mark that shows up on Dex’s skin isn’t one he’s expecting. It seems to come from nowhere, but the day after Jack comes out to the public, his crescent moon appears on Dex’s ankle.
They joke about it, of course. Bitty especially does a very poor job of fake-threatening Dex not to steal his boyfriend. But it gets Dex thinking about what it feels like to have someone other than his baby sister who means something special to him.
It takes another nine months for the next mark to show up, but this time it’s not a surprise. Dex lets himself open up more and when Nursey’s rainbow appears on his bicep, he can’t stop smiling for a week.
_X_ Kent Parson _X_
For the longest time, Kent Parson thinks his body is incapable of producing marks. He thinks he’s a Null. But when he’s sixteen he meets Jack Zimmerman, and everything changes with the crescent moon that appears on the inside of his thigh.
Kent’s sunflower appears on Jack about a week later, and it’s the most incredible feeling Kent has ever felt in his life. He and Jack mean something to each other.
But then the draft happens, and the rest of Kent’s skin stays blank. He and his therapist have multiple working theories, but the one she keeps going back to is that Kent doesn’t feel like he can emotionally give himself to anyone ever since the thing with Zimms.
Kent hopes—and even prays, despite not being a religious man—that one day he’ll wake up and have another tattoo somewhere on his body. But years pass and nothing changes. Kent gets frustrated. Considers giving up on any hope of finding someone who’s important to him.
Then Jack signs in Providence and things are—well, they’re not great, but they’re better. Kent feels like a weight is lifted off his shoulders. Like maybe it’s time for him to stop being so hard on himself and start letting people in.
Nothing changes until the All Star weekend. He’s a lot more social this time around than the last, and is happy to find that a few of his All Star game teammates end up with his sunflower on their bodies.
Nothing is more baffling than the morning he wakes up with a giant bumblebee on his wrist. Kent is shocked, and for a moment wonders if maybe this is just a prank. Someone stuck a fake tattoo on him after he fell asleep, or maybe he’s still dreaming.
No amount of soap and water can get the bee off, though. It’s real.
Kent feels dazed as he joins the rest of the players at breakfast, can’t help himself from staring at his wrist every chance he gets.
In a twisted fate, it’s Jack who tells him who the bee belongs to. It’s Mashkov, and Kent isn’t sure whether to be excited or freaked out. Maybe a bit of both?
Mashkov, “call me Tater,” is thrilled to see his bee on Kent’s wrist, and even more thrilled to show off the matching sunflower on his own. It’s all bizarre for Kent. It feels like it’s happening to someone else. But every time he looks down, it’s still there and it’s such a good feeling.