Alright! It took me a while and it's a really short one, but i hope you like my uptake on a tattoo for Anderson! Enjoy!

Studies in Ink 10 - Anderson

Sherlock would have never thought that Anderson of all people was the kind of guy to get a tattoo, and if the circumstances would not have been so dramatic, he probably would have never seen it.

A week had passed now since the Yard had started the seach for Sergeant Sally Donovan, who had gone missing on her way home from work.

The seriousness of the case was only underlined by the fact that Sherlock and Anderson were not bickering at all.

It seemed they were both adult enough to know that they needed to work together. The consulting detective hated the fact, but he knew that, even if it was only sometimes, Anderson was useful and not as bad at his job as it seemed to be. And Anderson, knowing that they had a very low chance to find Sally without Sherlock, let him be and tried to be useful.

Three more days passed until Sherlock could finally pinpoint the location where Sally was being held. Upon arriving at the abandoned house which used to be a printing company, they found the woman, naked but for her underwear, with bruisings all over her body, tied to a chair, but a tired smile on her face when they found her.

Anderson lost no time and unbuttoned his shirt, revealing his bare chest, and covered Sallys shivering shoulders, while John tried to talk to her and checked for injuries.

Upon seeing his bare back, Sherlock had to admit that it was a strange tattoo.

It looked just like an x-ray. Anderson had the image of his spine, at least a part of it, tattoed on his back. He was quite sure that, if the barrier of flesh would not have been in the way, the bones underneath would have been the same.

The image did not leave his thoughts, and it annoyed him to no end, that the topic on his mind was Anderson. Weeks after Sally had been rescued and the criminals had been sent to jail, Sherlock could not take it any longer.

John did not want to discuss the obviously stolen medical files that were spread on their kitchen table after one of Sherlocks strolls into the darkness of London the night before and ignored them.

Upon reading the files, Sherlock found out about Andersons spine damage from when he was a kid, and what dangerous and painful therapy he had to go through to get his spine back to normal.

Deep in tought, he brought the file back the following night, but couldn't stop wondering if even with his deduction, there were just some things in a persons past, that you could not see without an x-ray.

Anderson gave me a real problem, because it took me a long time to find something I thought was good. A first i wanted to write something funny and humiliating, but then I thought, there is always more to a person than what you can see, and Anderson, altough he is the Antagonist of the series, is obviously not an exception.

I hope you liked it. I'm thinking of maybe doing a piece on Mrs. Hudson or Harry. Or maybe another Sherlock one. i don 't know yet.