It was a Friday.
Markus remembered that it was a Friday, because they were already pretty busy days, but this Friday had broken all records.
When he'd started working at the tattoo parlor, he'd been given a choice. He could be paid by the hour, or by each individual tattoo he completed. He'd chosen an hourly rate, something he'd never regretted...
Until that Friday.
There were five unusual things about the tattoo-seeking horde who trickled in throughout the course of the day. Well, it started as a trickle - by about 3pm, it was more of a stampede.
First of all, the majority of them were first-time customers.
Getting tattooed, it's often been said, is addictive. Few people have exactly one tattoo, and so Markus was used to return clients - people who'd liked his work on their ankle or their forearm, and maybe wanted it touched up, or wanted more work done elsewhere.
First timers weren't uncommon, of course, but they typically made up less than a third of the shop's business.
Not that day, however.
Secondly, and this was even more unusual, they were all women. Not just most - all. At the start of the day a few guys dropped by, but as the day went on, the only men in the store were there to gawk at the plethora of women who had poured through the door, waiting for their turn to be inked.
Markus lost track after the first few dozen, but he inked more women that day than he had in the past month combined. After noon, his hands constantly threatened to cramp up, and he made sure to eat a banana during his lunch break.
At first, he'd made small talk with the girls - they were all, it turned out, from the college just over the road. Not particularly surprising; that was how a lot of his clients found him. As the day went on, however, he ceased chatting and just focused on getting the girls inked and out the door - there were more than enough people waiting for him to know that any time spent making small-talk was time being wasted.
After all, they all knew
exactly
what they wanted.
That was the third unusual thing. Normally, there'd be a bit of back-and-forth; they'd ask to see the book, or inquire about what tattoos were popular at the time.
On that fateful Friday, they sat down and described - in graphic detail - the exact tattoo they wanted. Each girl wanted a different tattoo, but each of them knew exactly what they were looking for.
The fourth unusual thing took him the longest to notice - as the day went on, he realized that the majority of the girls wanted their first tattoo were blonde.
And not just blonde: bottle-blonde, specifically.
It took him a while to recognize the smell, but it seemed that all of his new customers who weren't already blonde had bleached their hair...
that day
.
They had apparently woken up, bleached their hair, and then immediately come to him for a slutty tattoo.
And that was the fifth thing that all of these women had in common - they were all sluts.
This wasn't just apparent through their choice of tattoo - although that was certainly a solid indicator. No, these women were obviously, proudly,
blatantly
acting like little sluts. Most of them offered sexual favors in lieu of paying for a tattoo - Markus, a proudly gay man, declined...but he was slightly surprised to find how tempting the offer was.
He'd never been interested in women. He'd had a few girlfriends in highschool, mostly as a mask, and he'd even tried straight sex a few times during his first years in college, but it had only served to confirm what he already knew - he was gay, gay, gay as a tangerine. Gay as a male tangerine having anal intercourse with a second, also-male tangerine.
But for some reason, these bleach-blonde women were doing something to him. It wasn't
attraction
, exactly - they were missing something, something that was hard to put his finger on. But on more than one occasion, the women emitted small gasps of arousal as he tattooed them, and Markus found himself getting hard at the sound.
Weirder still, after they were tattooed, as they were staring lovingly at their new ink, he found them somehow
more
arousing.
It didn't make sense. He enjoyed being a tattoo artist for the art of it, not due to any fetish for tattooed people.
Especially
not because of a fetish for tattooed
women
.
Yet something about them, standing there half-naked, blonde, visibly aroused at the sight of their own tattoos...
It was doing something to him. Something he didn't like.
And, at the same time, something that he
really
liked.
On more than one occasion, Markus had looked up from his tattoo gun to find the women who were next in line making out...or doing even more than that. The men who'd been attracted by the long lines of scantily-clad blondes had quickly learned that even the crudest flirting was accepted enthusiastically, and Markus was fairly sure that the giggling couples (or, more often, trios) who asked him where the bathroom was weren't going to be using it for its intended purpose.
At first, he'd barked at the giggling women to stop making out, to remove their hands from under each other's skirts or tops...but it had seemed to have no effect, and so as time went on he'd given up, focusing instead on his job.
Focusing on his job, trying not to think about his confused, semi-erect penis.
Finally, 9pm rolled around, and Markus told the rest of the queue that they'd have to return the next day (when, to his great relief, he wouldn't be working). He ignored the offers of sex, oral sex, anal sex, group sex, rough sex, and sex that he was fairly sure was illegal, ushered the disappointed crowd out the door, and turned off the neon sign offering TATTOOS AND PIERCINGS.
After making sure that the bathrooms were empty of lingering blonde sluts and opportunistic dudes, he took advantage of an empty stall, and - to his great embarrassment - got himself off, imagining a tattooed slut kneeling at his feet, swallowing his cock, and bringing him off while he pulled on her blonde hair.
What the hell was wrong with him?
###
The next morning, Markus awoke surrounded by used tissues. Confused and ashamed, he'd jerked off twice more thinking about the stream of women he'd had through the tattoo parlor the day before - blonde, unabashed sluts, covered in tattoos, on their knees in front of him.
He'd started to jerk off a third time, but images of fucking these women -
fucking
them, like a straight guy - had muscled their way into his head, and the idea was so off-putting that he'd forced himself to stop touching himself and go to sleep.
Markus wasn't straight. He only had one tattoo himself - seven dots, across his left wrist, the colors of the pride flag. He was gay; he was
proudly