under the skin

The drive through the evening streets of Berlin passed in near-total silence. Outside, the city lights streaked across the windows, while my resolution echoed deep within me. There was no turning back. I had given my consent.

Both Loona and Nadja had dressed to the nines for this evening—an uncompromising, breathtaking Gothic-BDSM aesthetic that accentuated their power and authority in every single detail, sharpening the contrast with my own defenselessness to an agonizing degree.

Loona wore a bespoke, pitch-black dress of heavy matte leather with a high mandarin collar and silver ring-fasteners along her flanks, tracing every curve of her narrow waist. Her long legs were encased in opaque, semi-matte stockings that met knee-high, sharply cut lace-up boots with razor-sharp stiletto heels and silver buckles. Her jet-black hair was tied into a sleek ponytail at the back of her head, her lips painted nearly black, and her familiar, heavy vanilla perfume filled the car like an imperial seal.

Nadja embodied an equally dark, yet even more playful variation of the look: a tightly laced velvet corset over an asymmetrical mesh top with raw hems, paired with a short pleated skirt of glossy black vinyl and over-the-knee platform boots of polished leather, their buckles chiming softly with every subtle movement. A wide leather choker with a solid O-ring sat snug around her neck, her dark curls tumbled wildly around her cheeks, and the heavy, earthy scent of patchouli and leather drifted from her with every gesture. Both women looked like figures from an elite, untouchable underworld—ready for an exclusive evening in which I was nothing more than an escorted exhibit.

The car finally pulled up on a quiet side street before an old industrial driveway. Behind the tall windows of the studio, no bright retail lighting shone; the official neon sign was dark, and the blinds were drawn almost completely shut. A discreet logo on the glass door identified the studio, but regular business hours had ended long ago.

We stepped out. Standing before the entrance, Nadja rapped her manicured nails sharply against the security glass.

Only seconds later, a silhouette detached itself from the shadows within. A key turned audibly in the lock, the heavy door swung open, and the sharp scent of disinfectant, machine oil, cold espresso, and heavy aftershave washed over us.

In the doorway stood a man I had never seen before. He appeared to be in his early thirties, tall, with an athletic, distinctly muscular build. A plain black muscle shirt accentuated his broad shoulders and defined chest, while heavy silver chains gleamed at his neck in the dim light. His tanned arms were densely covered in high-contrast dark tattoos from his knuckles all the way to the nape of his neck. The stranger exuded that brazen, self-assured masculinity that left no doubt he was accustomed to standing at the center of attention and taking whatever he pleased.

"Well, finally," the man said in a deep, gravelly voice, leaning casually against the doorframe. A confident grin spread across his face as his gaze locked onto Nadja. "I was starting to think you were standing me up tonight. You look damn hot, gorgeous."

"As if I’d ever keep you waiting," Nadja replied with a flirtatious laugh. Stepping forward with fluid grace, she stood right before him and gave him an air-kiss on the cheek, her fingertips idly grazing the firm bicep of his upper arm. "We still had something important to discuss. You know how thorough we are."

The tattoo artist let out a low laugh, eyeing her frame in the short vinyl skirt and boots with undisguised appreciation, shaking his head with amusement. "With you, I know that all too well. Come on in."

He stepped aside to let Nadja and Loona pass. As I went to cross the threshold last, his gaze drifted down to me. The charming smirk on his lips instantly hardened into a cool, condescending sneer. He took me in from head to foot—my neat coat, the conventional cut of my hair, my visibly rigid posture.

"And this is the candidate?" the tattoo artist asked dryly over my shoulder, addressing the women. "Looking a bit pale around the gills, isn't he?"

"He is perfectly prepared," Loona clarified with cutting composure as she slipped out of her coat, smoothed down her tight leather dress, and sat on the waiting-area sofa with her booted legs crossed. "Just do your job."

The man locked the door behind me. The metallic clunk of the deadbolt severed every avenue of retreat.

Inside, the studio was spacious and modern: exposed concrete, vintage factory pendant lights, several sterile workstations equipped with black leather reclining tables, and illuminated display cases.

On his workstation, he had already laid out his supplies. Slipping a pair of black nitrile gloves over his tattooed hands, he snapped the cuffs tight against his wrists and turned back to Nadja.

"I looked over your draft," he said, shooting Nadja a loaded wink. "Pretty unambiguous linework. I like it. Clean, minimalist, but anyone in the scene knows what's up immediately. You like things crystal clear, don't you?"

"Always," Nadja replied with amusement, leaning against the edge of his drafting table and crossing her legs to show off her platform boots and vinyl skirt to full advantage. "Half-measures are boring—you know that better than anyone."

The corner of the artist's mouth twitched. Leaning slightly closer, his tone dropped an octave: "If you say so. We should grab a drink after this, once we're done here. Just the two of us."

"Let's see how well you behave yourself, Ben," Nadja countered with a sparkling gaze, matching his flirtation without the slightest hesitation.

While the two exchanged this effortless banter, I stood beside them like a foreign object, my thoughts spinning out of control. The humiliation burned hot and sharp through my veins. Here stood this Ben—muscular, uninhibited, attractive, free of any restraint—openly flirting with Nadja while looking down at me like an inferior piece of stock. And me? I was a medical student, yet in here I was nothing more than a disciplined body, locked into thirty-five millimeters of surgical steel, completely exposed before a man who embodied everything I would never be.

Ben finally turned his attention to me. His expression settled back into pure business, carrying that offhand superiority that made me feel even smaller.

"Coat off, jacket off," Ben ordered curtly. "Trousers and underwear down to your knees. Onto the table, lie on your side, right leg straight."

My hands trembled faintly as I pulled the zipper of my jacket down. My mouth was dry as sandpaper. Before the eyes of the two women in black leather and velvet, and under the derisive gaze of the tattooist, I unbuckled my belt. The denim of my jeans dropped to the floor, followed by the fabric beneath.

The cool air of the studio settled over my hairless, bare skin. And there, starkly illuminated beneath the work lamp, the Neukölln surgical steel cage sat completely exposed. The padlock, the slender struts, and the M10 thread at the faceplate caught the glare.

Ben paused for a second. His eyebrows lifted, and a derisive, raspy chuckle broke from his throat.

"Clean craftsmanship," Ben remarked dryly, tapping his gloved index finger against the cool metal over my pubic bone. A sharp, metallic ring echoed through the room, sending a jolt like an electric shock straight through my limbs. "Not bad. Someone did quite a thorough job. Locked down tight, huh?"

Loona calmly sipped the espresso Ben had set out for her, offering a cool smile from the sofa. "He doesn't have a millimeter of leeway. And that's exactly how it stays."

"Fair enough," Ben said with a shrug, catching my shoulder and pressing me onto the black leather of the table without a shred of ceremony. "No squirming, doc. The stiller you hold, the faster you're through it."

He reached for a spray bottle of disinfectant. The ice-cold mist struck my sensitized skin just above the right iliac crest, running down in thin rivulets to the rim of the steel base ring. Ben rubbed the area down with a paper towel. Then he picked up the transfer stencil: the downward-pointing triangle with the integrated Venus element.

Loona rose smoothly from the couch. The leather of her dress creaked softly, and the click of her stiletto heels on the concrete floor kept time like a slow march to an execution. Walking up to the table, she positioned herself right beside Ben and leaned forward, her heavy vanilla scent completely overwhelming the clinical smell of the antiseptic. Her cool fingers brushed over my bare chest, tracing possessively before she looked over Ben's shoulder to inspect the placement.

"A touch lower, Ben," Loona directed with quiet, unmistakable authority. "Right onto the bone margin. Positioned so that it peeks out just above his waistband whenever he takes off his lab coat. I want him to feel it every single day."

"You got it, boss," Ben replied with a crooked grin, accepting her direction without hesitation, pressing the stencil firmly onto my skin and peeling the backing paper away. The purple lines stood out razor-sharp against my flesh. "Perfect."

Nadja watched the process with amused detachment, sipping her wine and offering me a mocking smile, while Loona let her hand linger on my ribs for a second longer before stepping back.

Ben stepped onto his foot pedal, reached for the tattoo machine, and slotted in a fresh needle. He dipped the tip into the small ink cap filled with jet-black pigment.

The high-pitched, aggressive buzz of the tattoo machine tore through the silence of the room.

My pulse spiked, my heart hammering in my throat. The scene I had pictured in my head earlier played out in real time: lying bare and helpless before another man who was marking me like livestock, while the woman who owned me called the shots and her friend lounged nearby, flirting and sealing my complete dispossession.

"Hold still," Ben said with rough calm. His free hand clamped down heavily onto my hip, pinning me flat against the table and pulling the skin taut over the bone.

The vibrating needle descended. The first strike hit like a red-hot blade. A sharp, searing pain carved straight into the periosteum of my pelvic bone. My entire body arched involuntarily, my thighs locking hard against the steel housing, but Ben's iron grip kept me pinned to the surface.

"Breathe nice and easy, doc," Ben mocked quietly over the machine's drone as the fine black lines were driven beneath my skin. "This is what you wanted, after all."

Every single puncture felt like a fine, white-hot wire dragging through the periosteum of my right hip bone. Yet the physical pain was nothing compared to the paralyzing disgrace suffocating me on that table.

I lay on my side across the black leather, legs bent, jeans and underwear bunched around my knees. Completely vulnerable. Completely exposed. Being stripped before women like Loona, Vanessa, or the salon staff was one thing—a warped dynamic my mind had rationalized through a mix of shame and dark fascination. But this was an entirely new, brutal threshold.

For the first time in my life, I was lying like this before another man.

Ben towered over me. He embodied every inch of that unapologetic, invulnerable masculinity that had been stripped from me day by day: broad-shouldered, athletic, relaxed in his tank top, his skin covered in heavy ink, entirely free and sovereign in his own skin. A guy who took whatever he wanted. And that very man was pinning me down with his heavy, tattooed hand like an animal on a prep table, while his other hand guided the buzzing needle across my bone.

The harsh, sterile glare of the lamp bore down without mercy. It caught the dull sheen of the Neukölln surgical steel. The thirty-five millimeters. The flat front cap with the protruding M10 thread. The asymmetrical base ring biting deep into my perineal seam. My own flesh, entirely compressed and reduced to the size of a thumb. All of it lay laid bare, less than a hand's width from Ben's gloved fingers.

He saw it. He saw every bit of it. Every man understands the primal baseline of his own sex—and Ben saw no rival here, no Charité medical student, no bourgeois heir. He saw a guy who had let two women put him on a leash. Who had willingly surrendered the last shred of his dignity behind a lock.

"No need to tense up like that, doc," Ben murmured in an amused, low voice, his eyes never leaving the fine lines. His fingers pressed heavily into my hip to keep the skin stretched taut. "The more you tense, the more the ink weeps. Just relax. Coming up on the tip of the triangle now."

His tone wasn't even hostile—and that was what made it so unbearable. It was the easy, casual condescension of a man looking down at an inferior object. To him, I wasn't an equal. I was a curiosity, a domesticated toy two attractive women were carting around.

A few yards behind the table, fine crystal clinked.

"How's he holding up, Ben?" Nadja’s cheerful voice called out. She sat on the sofa with her legs crossed, her platform boots swinging in time with the background music, toasting Ben with her glass of red wine. "He's usually so terribly disciplined at university. Is he at least making a face?"

"Shaking like a leaf, gorgeous," Ben chuckled softly, the needle tracing across my bone margin in short, precise sweeps. "Keeps still enough, though. Guess he learned how to behave."

"He certainly did," Loona interjected with velvety, cool composure. Sitting beside Nadja, a sovereign in her matte leather dress, she took in the scene with that calm authority that left zero doubt as to who owned whom. "He knows perfectly well what happens if he gets restless."

Ben shot a bold wink over his shoulder at Nadja. "Tough school. I like it. When you come out for a drink with me later, you definitely have to tell me how you two got this guy so tame."

"Maybe I'll tell you over that drink," Nadja tossed back with a teasing laugh, leaning back and letting her eyes wander appreciatively over Ben's broad back. "Depends entirely on how clean that tattoo turns out."

I shut my eyes tight, but there was no escaping the scene. A mixture of bottomless despair and burning mortification boiled in my veins. The two women were openly trading flirtations with this guy right in front of me. Ben was blatantly hitting on Nadja while holding me down with one hand and inking the symbol of female supremacy into my flank.

And my own body? It betrayed me in the most wretched way possible.

Instead of surging with defiance, a dark, feverish arousal lanced through my pelvis with every exchange, with every patronizing laugh from this man. The degradation of being seen, handled, and dismissed by another man in this state, while the women looked on and enjoyed the spectacle, was so absolute that my trapped flesh pressed involuntarily against the cage. The tissue strained for room that didn't exist, crashing instantly into thirty-five millimeters of surgical steel with sharp pain. The pressure pulled against the hairless skin of my groin, while the padlock ticked faintly against the bars with every tremor.

Ben felt the movement under his hands. Pausing the machine for a fraction of a second, he wiped away the excess blood and ink with a coarse paper towel and tapped his gloved index finger against the cylinder.

A dry, metallic ring echoed through the studio.

"Well, look at that," Ben mocked softly, barely above a whisper, yet every word landed like a slap across the face. He leaned in a fraction closer, his gaze dropping straight to the locked cylinder. "Someone's trying to act up. Seems like you almost enjoy lying here like this in front of me, huh, doc? Can barely breathe down there, but your pulse is through the roof."

I bit down on my lower lip until I tasted copper. I had no reply. I had no defense. I lay there, an aspiring doctor, reduced to a helpless steel tube.

"Keep him still, Ben," Loona called from the couch, her voice slicing through the air like cut crystal. "I want him to feel every single second."

"Don't worry, boss," Ben replied with a rough chuckle, lining the needle up once more.

The buzz of the machine flared again, and the next strike drove deep into my skin—the indelible mark of my submission, inked by a man who held me in absolute contempt, under the eyes of the women to whom I belonged unconditionally.

The sharp drone of the machine ran on in steady, mechanical intervals.

Ben's hand clamped my hip like an iron vise while he drew the wipe across the burning bone margin, closing the final, delicate line of the triangle. The pain was stinging and hot, but the true paralysis ran deeper: the reality of having been seen in every humiliating detail of my subjugation by this completely free, sovereign man cut deeper than the black ink beneath my skin.

"Done," Ben said dryly at last, taking his foot off the pedal.

The abrupt silence left by the needle's stop hung heavy in the studio. Ben picked up a spray bottle of green soap, generously dousing my flank, and wiped away the remaining blood and excess pigment with firm pressure. Every pass burned like fire.

"Clean work, if I do say so myself," Ben remarked, turning to shoot Nadja a self-satisfied grin. "Finest linework. Anyone who knows the code will spot who calls the shots immediately."

Loona rose from the couch with smooth grace. Her leather dress creaked softly as she stepped toward the table. Her stiletto heels clicked across the bare concrete with deliberate slowness. Positioning herself beside Ben, she tilted her head slightly and inspected the fresh, inflamed tattoo on the crest of my right hip.

The minimalist triangle with the integrated Venus symbol sat razor-sharp on my pale, bare skin—right along the bone line, barely two fingers' width from the asymmetrical base ring of the surgical steel.

"Flawlessly placed," Loona judged quietly. A trace of cold satisfaction played upon her dark lips. Reaching out with two fingers, she brushed gently over the unbroken skin beside the swelling before turning her gaze down to my flushed, sweat-slicked face. "Small, precise, and permanent. You held remarkably still, John."

Nadja sauntered over as well, glass in hand, her tall platform boots chiming faintly. Resting her hip against the edge of the table, she leaned down far enough for her earthy scent to cloud my senses, letting out a cheerful giggle.

"Looks incredible on you, John," Nadja said, eyes dancing as she playfully tapped the edge of the swelling with a lacquered nail. "A genuine piece of art. And tomorrow when you're walking the wards at the Charité in your white coat, not a soul will suspect what's hiding under your trousers—except for us."

Ben shook his head with an amused smirk, produced a roll of transparent breathable film, and cut a section to size.

"Hold still, doc," Ben instructed, smoothing the film over the fresh wound and pressing the edges down firmly. "Keep this on for three days. No scratching, no messing with it. Though keeping your hands off yourself is something you've already mastered, clearly."

A raspy laugh escaped his chest as he snapped the nitrile gloves off his hands and tossed them into the bin.

"Alright," Ben said, turning his back on me completely, looking to Nadja with open expectation. "My part of the deal is handled. How about that drink, gorgeous?"

"Another time, maybe, Ben," Nadja replied with a coy smile, offering a charming wink as she swept a dark curl from her forehead. "We still have a long night ahead of us. You know how it is: when you have a brand-new exhibit, you don't hide it away immediately."

Ben's eyebrows lifted briefly, then he shrugged with a grin. "Pity. Don't let me keep you, then."

"Get dressed, John," Loona ordered with businesslike detachment, stepping back. "Trousers up, belt fastened. We're moving."

I pushed up from the table on trembling knees. My pelvis burned, the dressing pulled tight over the bone, and as the heavy denim of my jeans slid over the surgical steel and the fresh tattoo, a sharp pain flared through my flank. Fastening my belt, I pulled my jacket on and stepped beside the women with my head bowed.

Ben escorted us to the glass door, unlocked it, and nodded goodbye to the two women. When his gaze brushed me one final time, it carried that condescending, amused smirk that sent heat rushing straight back into my cheeks.

"Take care, doc," Ben sneered under his breath. "Keep a good hold on that leash."

The heavy studio door clicked shut behind us. The metallic latch sealed the night as the cool Berlin evening air washed over my face.

Out by the curb, the car was waiting. The mark was driven into my flesh, irreversible and permanent. And walking behind Loona and Nadja, I felt the friction of the steel and the sting of the ink with every step—the mute, total certainty that the conventional world I had clung to so desperately was lost to me, piece by piece, for good.