Gemotions

He stared at the photograph, his jaw clenched, his knuckles white against the kitchen table. Marcus, a writer, valued his privacy, his solitude. The image, sent to him by a friend, shattered that sense of security.

It was a tattoo, a line-by-line reproduction of an excerpt from his unpublished novel, ‘The Echoing Caves’. A passage he'd painstakingly crafted, a secret he'd shared with no one. Someone had taken a piece of him and permanently inked it on their skin.

He felt a chill, a creeping dread. He closed his eyes, the words from his novel now etched in his mind, along with the unsettling image. He felt vulnerable. He wanted to delete the picture, to erase the very existence of the tattoo. But it was too late. The feeling lingered.