🕷️ The InkSink Parlor – Open Late, No Questions Asked

The rain had just started to fall when the van rolled into yet another middle-of-nowhere city, the kind with more vape shops than streetlights and at least one billboard advertising “Discount Bait & Divorce.”

They were two days early for the next gig. For once.
Naturally, that meant trouble.

“Guys,” Gabriel said from the back, holding up his phone like it was sacred scripture. “This place has a tattoo shop with 4.8 stars on Yelp.”
Cassie raised an eyebrow. “Out of how many?”
“…Five.”
“Uh huh.”

Thane didn’t even glance up from tightening a power connector in his rigging bag. “We are not getting tattoos. We’re getting groceries. Laundry. Sleep.”
Maya: “Lame.”
Jonah: “Coward.”
Rico: “I bet he secretly has a tramp stamp.”
Thane: “I heard that.”

Gabriel leaned forward between the seats, eyes wide and conspiratorial.
“What if we just… looked? No needles. Just reconnaissance. Come on. Be wolves of culture.”
Mark, arms crossed and unimpressed: “This smells like a trap.”
Gabriel grinned. “So does Thane after load-in, but we still take him places.”

The shop was tucked between a laundromat and a pawn shop. Its flickering neon sign read:
INKSINK – WALK-INS, MISTAKES, & MEMORIES.

Inside, it looked exactly like every tattoo parlor in the movies—walls plastered with flash art, the scent of antiseptic and regret heavy in the air. A man with a lopsided mohawk and full-face skull ink looked up from a sketchpad.

“You the furry band?”
Thane pinched the bridge of his nose.
Gabriel: “That’s us!”
Tattoo Guy: “Cool. I did a werewolf paw on a preacher last week. Midnight special.”

Cassie picked out a microphone wrapped in a rose.
Maya found a flaming guitar on a poster and said, “That. But angrier.”
Jonah, who claimed he was just here to watch, somehow ended up pointing at a cartoon possum holding drumsticks.
Rico wanted a stylized wolf skull on his shoulder blade to “look cool in profile shots.”
Mark said nothing… and then asked if they had ink that would show under stage lights but not normal lighting. (They did. Of course.)

Gabriel?
Oh, Gabriel was ready.
He picked out a design he claimed he’d “seen in a dream”—a full moon, a claw slash, and a bass clef stitched together like some supernatural battle standard.
He wanted it on his back.
All of it.

Tattoo Guy blinked. “You sure?”
Gabriel: “No.”
Tattoo Guy: “Perfect.”

While the others got prepped, inked, and numbed into varying levels of existential dread, Thane sat in a creaky metal folding chair, arms crossed and glaring.
At one point, Gabriel leaned over mid-ink and stage whispered, “Come on, Thane, even Mark’s doing it.”
Thane didn’t move. “Mark got ultraviolet lighting cues tattooed on his arm. That’s functional.”
Rico shouted from across the room, “You’re just scared of needles!”
“I am the needle,” Thane growled, gesturing at a bundle of XLR cables.

Jonah nearly passed out twice and left with a smiling possum on his bicep.
Cassie’s mic tattoo looked suspiciously like it was shouting.
Maya’s flaming guitar had literal smoke curls tattooed in.
Rico? Rico looked like a horror movie album cover and was thrilled.
Mark, when shown his under-UV ink lighting pattern in a dark room, simply nodded once.
Gabriel, shirtless and glowing with pride, looked like a battle-scarred lunar warlord.
“This,” he said, spinning slowly, “is how I ascend.”
Thane: “This is how you get a staph infection.”

They limped back to the van like war survivors.
Gabriel curled up in the backseat, whispering lovingly to his new ink.
Thane buckled in and muttered, “Next stop, an actual hospital.”

Maya, flipping through photos on her phone, smirked.
“Tell me this tour isn’t the best goddamn disaster we’ve ever survived.”