He’d tattooed his body all over for a reason. His beauty was the one thing about him that his mother didn’t criticize, and she treated him like a prized purebred in her efforts to marry him off. So the harder she tried, the more he inked. Yes, he liked the art, but he also wanted to deface the thing that his family valued most highly about him. He wanted to carve his inner rawness onto his skin like a warning, like the truth; he wanted to make the outside of his body match the inside.