Three Sentence Ficathon

The prompt/idea wouldn't leave me alone, so here are two more fills which in theory can each stand alone but can also be read as parts two and three following my previous fill to this prompt.


"I had to pick somewhere I could reach but no one would ever see, not even tailors, and it was meant to be a compass star, but I bungled it and had to turn it into a flower instead, and even then not a very good one, but in my defense I was eleven," Stede prattled, barely pausing for breath as he shed breeches and drawers to expose the tattoo whose existence Ed had disputed on the grounds that, if Stede had one, then Ed would have already seen it, given how often they had been getting naked with each other lately. "In hindsight, it's pathetic," he concluded with a sigh, gesturing to the little blotch of ink high on his inner thigh, blurred and faded with age, which Ed had indeed seen before but mistook for a birthmark, "but I so desperately wanted to feel at least a little piratical, and a hidden tattoo was all I could get away with back then."

"Don't call it pathetic," Ed said, bending to kiss the tattoo before continuing, "not when you did it all by yourself, in such a sensitive location," kiss, "at age eleven; no, I'd call that pretty badass."


***


"Hey, Izzy," Edward said as he hurried over, his face wearing that look of anticipatory delight which Izzy had started feel wary of years ago and then learned to distrust even more in the time since Stede Bonnet had bumbled his way into their lives, "how old were you when you got your first tattoo?"

Bonnet, who Edward had dragged with him, looked vaguely uneasy, like he'd rather not have whatever this conversation was, so Izzy felt willing to actually answer the question instead of telling them both to fuck off with their distractions and let him get back to work, and after digging back through the decades to remember, said, "Twenty three, maybe twenty four."

Edward nodded, and Izzy didn't know what mental math he was doing but could see the exact moment Edward reached his answer, because the man's smile bloomed into a full grin, and he cackled, dragging Izzy into a hug with his right arm while doing the same to Bonnet with his left and shouting, "Ha, that means Stede's tattoo is years older than any ink either of us have," and the only response Izzy could give to that was, of course, "What the fuck?"