Bare

There was something beautifully dead about her tattoo. It was for all those lost, wasted, dead years. It was for everything that she had left behind, and everything that had left her behind.

He drew it, in thick black marker on my bare back late one lonely Parisian winter night. She drifted in and out of sleep, the cool ink and his burning lips pressing into her bare skin.

He finalized it with a spell he found in an old school textbook. It was a tree, its limbs as bare as the their tiny flat on the wrong side of Paris.

Her tattoo was for all the leaves that had fallen, for all the things that had fallen out of her life, all the hopes, the dreams, the memories. All that was left was a bare tree.