The door bears no hours. Only the faint outline of letters, half-erased by weather and time. Inside, the air hums with current, the whisper of machines, the breath of candles, the weight of devotion. Every week, one man sits in the chair and lets memory pierce the skin. Every stroke of the needle is prayer, every drop of blood an offering.
He is not trying to forget.
He is trying to bring something back.
Under His Name is a gothic love story told through fifty-two sessions of ink and resurrection. It begins with grief and ends with transfiguration, charting the slow, luminous descent from body to myth. The marks change. The room changes. The world itself begins to listen.
And by the final hum, what remains is not a man mourning the dead, but a body that has learned to speak the language of eternity.
Saltwater Morning
The first cut is confession. In a room alive with hum and salt, a man offers his chest to memory, and the act of remembrance begins to sound like prayer.
The second session hurt more.
It surprised me. I had told myself that the first time would be the worst, that the shock of the needle against unmarked skin was the thing I needed to survive. I was wrong. The body remembers where it has been broken. Scar tissue holds a memory all its own.
The morning began grey and heavy, the kind of sky that looks like it has forgotten sunlight. Rain had passed in the night and left the streets rinsed and pale. As I walked, my shirt caught on the healing scab over my heart. The name it covered throbbed faintly, a private pulse beneath the cotton. Every step reminded me that he was written there now, fixed and unerasable.
The studio was as I remembered it. Low light. The faint smell of disinfectant and something thicker beneath, like old incense and sea air. The bell above the door gave a soft, tired ring when I entered. He was already setting up, sleeves rolled, gloves waiting beside the machine.
“You came back,” he said.
“I said I would.”
He nodded once. No surprise, no approval. Only acknowledgement, as if returning to pain was the most ordinary thing in the world.
He glanced at my chest where the first name lay hidden. “How did it heal?”
“Clean,” I said. “Too clean.”
He tipped his head, curious, but did not ask what I meant. Instead he pointed to the chair. “Where this time?”
“The shoulder,” I said. “Here.” I touched the curve where bone met muscle, the place that had once carried his sleeping weight on long train rides home.
He turned my body slightly, studying the line of my skin like a coastline. “Same name?”
“Always.”
The machine woke with its familiar hum. He cleaned the area, cool swipes that made me shiver, then pressed the needle to the old scar that lived there from some forgotten childhood fall. The first touch was small, sharp, like a tooth testing softness. The second one reached deeper. Scar tissue does not give easily. It resisted, then surrendered all at once. The pain made my eyes water.
“Breathe,” he said quietly.
I pulled air in through my teeth. The smell in the room shifted. Beneath the antiseptic, I caught it clearly this time, the scent that had haunted the first session but stayed half formed. Saltwater. Not the clean brightness of open sea, but the thick, mineral smell of a shoreline at low tide.
He worked in steady passes, wiping away blood and ink until the letters began to rise out of the skin, dark and precise. To distract myself from the ache, I started to talk. The words came slowly at first, then gathered speed.
“I scattered his ashes in winter,” I said. “The tide was wrong. It came in too fast.”
His hand paused for a second, then moved again. “Where?”
“South of here. A small bay. He liked the rocks. Said they looked like something that had crawled out of the sea and fallen asleep.”
The needle traced another curve, the sound deepening as it moved over the tougher tissue. My voice blurred with the hum. “I tipped the urn and the wind caught part of him. It blew the ash back at us. My hands, my mouth. I tasted him. Smoke, salt, and bone.”
The artist did not comment. His jaw tightened, but he kept his focus on the line he was pulling through my flesh. He was not there to console. He was there to write.
“He went quickly,” I said. “Everyone tells me that was a mercy.”
He cleaned the shoulder again. “Is that what you think?”
I wanted to answer, but the needle hit a tender point and my breath broke. The pain became a white heat that spread down my arm and into my fingers. Tears pricked the corners of my eyes. I stared at the opposite wall and tried to count something, anything.
It was then that I heard the door.
A soft creak, wood moving in its frame. No bell. No rush of air. Just that sound, the small complaint of hinges that have been opened by a familiar weight. Neither of us had touched it.
The artist paused. “Did you hear that?”
“Yes.”
We both waited. No footsteps followed. No voice. The silence thickened. The smell of salt grew stronger, threaded now with wet sand and cold stone. The tiny hairs along my arm stood up beneath his gloved hand.
He shook his head once, as if dismissing his own unease, and returned to the needle. The machine’s hum rose again. I tried to focus on the rhythm, but something had changed in the room. The air felt occupied.
I saw him before I dared to move. A shape near the sink, where the metal bowl for rinsing needles stood waiting. At first it was no more than a darker shadow, a smudge in the corner of my vision. Then it sharpened. A wet shirt clinging to a chest I knew. Hair pushed back from a familiar forehead. Water dripping from his fingers.
He watched us.
My throat closed. I could not speak his name. I could only follow the line of his gaze as it moved from my face to the place where the needle worked. There was no anger there, no accusation. Only a tired tenderness, like the look he used to give me after long days when neither of us had the right words.
The artist glanced up, catching my expression. “You all right?”
I nodded, because I did not know how to explain that the dead man we were writing was standing six feet away, leaning against the sink like he had never left.
He stepped closer. Droplets of water touched the ground, though I heard no splash. When he reached my shoulder, he lifted his hand and placed it gently over the spot where the needle pierced. The pressure was light and cool. The pain vanished. The hum of the machine softened to something almost soothing.
The artist frowned. “You stopped flinching.”
“He is here,” I almost said. Instead, I let my head fall back and closed my eyes. For a few heartbeats, both sensations coexisted. The mechanical bite of the needle, steady and precise, and the impossible warmth of a hand that had been ash not long ago.
Then the presence lifted. When I opened my eyes, the space by the sink was empty again. A small puddle remained where no leak could explain it, a circle of water that reflected the light like a dark coin.
The artist cleaned the fresh tattoo, covering it with gauze. “It will peel,” he said. “That is how it heals.”
“So did he,” I thought, but kept that to myself.
Outside, the rain had returned. It struck the bandage and bled pink at the edges, ink and blood and water leaching into the cloth. I walked home with the taste of salt on my lips, unsure whether it came from the sky or from memory rising again through my skin.
Wonderfully written. Gave me chills and left a tear in my eye. Great piece.
Really nice work, a beautiful flow of narrative, literature, feeling and words. Beautiful imagery and combination of presence to set the scene or paint a picture.