I'd been putting off the consultation for three months. The design was ready — a climbing fern along my left ribs, the kind that would unfurl when I was calm and curl tight when I was anxious. Diagnostic ink, my therapist called it. *Homework*, essentially.
Remi's studio smelled like rubbing alcohol and bergamot. She had a reputation for calibration work specifically, her sensitivity rating off the charts on the booking platform. Some artists just slap the array down and let the software do the mapping. Remi reads manually. Old school. I'd paid extra for that without entirely examining why.
"Take your shirt off and lie on your side," she said, already pulling on thin conductive gloves. "Tell me when you feel heat."
*I was not prepared for her hands.*
---
The first passes were clinical. Her fingertips moved in slow grids across my ribs, pressing, releasing, noting the skin's micro-responses on her tablet. The fern design glowed faintly in the transfer sheet, waiting to learn the geography of me. I breathed. I tried to think about grocery lists.
Then she hit a spot two inches below my left breast and my whole body answered before I could stop it — a sharp inhale, my hips shifting involuntarily against the table.
"There," she said quietly. She pressed again, deliberate, watching her tablet. "Your response curve is strong here. This is where the primary node goes." She didn't move her hand. "Okay?"
*Okay* was not exactly the word I would have chosen.
"Yeah," I said. "Keep going."
She worked down my side and I stopped pretending to think about groceries. Every spot she found was a small revelation — the dip of my waist, the ridge of my hip, a place at the small of my back that made me grip the table edge. She was reading me like a document and I was letting her.
"You're mapping higher than I expected," she said. "I need to go up toward your shoulder, and — depending on your comfort — across your sternum. The ink follows your nervous system, not the design."
"Do it," I said, and I'd turned over before she finished the sentence.
She looked at me for a moment. Then: "Tell me if you want me to stop."
"I'll tell you."
Her hands moved across my chest and I watched her face while she worked — focused, unhurried, genuinely *interested* in what my body was telling her. When she pressed the heel of her palm flat against my sternum and asked me to breathe deep, I reached up and covered her hand with mine. She didn't pull back.
"Off the clock," I said.
"Off the clock," she agreed.
---
I'm not going to walk you through every detail. You can imagine. What I'll say is that the transfer sheet was still glowing on the table two hours later, the fern furled completely tight, and when Remi laughed at that — really laughed, her head dropping to my shoulder — it slowly, visibly opened.
She tapped the design with one finger, watching it respond.
"Good data," she said. "I know exactly where to put the nodes now."
*She did. She really, really did.*
I go back Thursday for the actual ink, and I've already decided I'm paying for the manual calibration again.
