Indelible Feelings
The leather chair squeaked underneath him as he shifted his weight. There was soft music playing through the speakers in the waiting room, but the squeak was loud enough that the receptionist looked up from her computer.
He smiled with a clenched-lipped apologetic smile, and she smiled back before resuming her tick-ticking at the computer.
The tattoo parlor was unlike anything he had expected, with its framed artwork dotting the walls. Where he had expected frayed pieces of paper with pictures of anchors and barbed wire were elegant line drawings and alluring photographs of mysterious people. He stood up to take a closer look at what appeared to be a drawing of a man’s body with a bird’s head attached to it.
“Michael?” A voice called from down the corridor.
Her voice, which sounded both authoritative and unsure in equal measure, trilled through the empty space of the waiting room. As he spun around to greet the owner of it, his leg bumped into a low table with a delicate glass vase with sunflowers, causing the vase to slowly lose balance and topple over.
As it teetered back and forth, he quickly regained his footing and shot both hands out to catch it, breathing a sigh of relief as he caught it mere inches from completely toppling over and shattering on the floor.
“Well, aren’t you the quick one?” she commented.