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.
The First Name
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 needle met my chest just above the heart. The sound filled the studio, a small room made of breath and current. It was neither quiet nor loud, but steady, like a pulse finding its way back after being lost. The light hung low, dim and gold, trembling slightly from the candle near the counter. The air smelled of antiseptic and smoke. Beneath it, something older lingered, the faint, persistent scent of salt.
He asked the name again, though we both knew it. I said it quietly, the syllables soft and unfinished. They left my mouth like something that had been waiting too long to be spoken. When the sound reached the air, the temperature shifted. The world seemed to contract around that word. It was a small word, only four letters, but it contained the whole shape of a body that was no longer here.
The first line of ink was thin, black, exact. Pain flared, then steadied, as if my body recognised what was being done to it. The needle hummed and I felt the vibration travel through the skin, down into bone. He moved slowly, with a kind of reverence, his gloved hand steady, his breathing even. I watched the way his wrist turned with each curve of the letter. It felt like a ceremony performed not for the living, but for what lingers when breath is gone.
He paused to wipe the blood. I could see the beginning of the name forming, fragile and certain. Beneath the light, the ink shone wetly. The sound of the machine filled the silence again, and I found myself matching its rhythm. Inhale. Hum. Exhale. Hum. My heart followed suit, obedient and uneven.
When he spoke, his voice was careful. “You sure about this?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s already written.”
He didn’t ask what I meant. Perhaps he knew.
As the needle pressed deeper, the edges of the world began to blur. The hum became a hymn, a sound that seemed to come not from the machine, but from the memory itself. I saw flashes: skin against skin, the faint line of his smile as the tide receded behind him, the way he used to touch the back of my neck when he wanted me to listen.
The pain folded into warmth. Every moment of hurt seemed to loosen something that had been locked. I thought of that morning, the one I’ve never told anyone about, the sea pale with light, the water at his knees. He had turned once, laughing. There had been wind in his hair and salt on his lips. I had thought, stupidly, that the world might stay that way forever. That the body, if loved hard enough, could refuse disappearance.
The machine stopped. The sound left the air heavy and still. I opened my eyes. The artist leaned back, studying his work, a cloth in hand. “All finished,” he said.
I nodded. The word itself felt too small to hold the ache that was spreading through me. I slid my shirt back on, though the fabric clung to the rawness beneath.
Outside, the day had dimmed into Sunday quiet. Bells were ringing somewhere, their tones slow and uneven. The wind carried the faint smell of rain. I walked home through streets that looked half-asleep, each step tender, as if the pavement itself might bruise.
When I reached my room, I stood before the mirror. The light fell across my chest. The name was raised slightly, red-edged, warm to the touch. It seemed to breathe with me. For a moment I thought I saw movement beneath it, like water rippling under skin.
I whispered the name again, and the sound trembled through the air.
It looked alive.
It was alive.
And somewhere, deep beneath the surface, something answered.
A memory that is physically there.
Physical establishment of a connection. A link to a past that has changed a life.