“That… it’s strange. What are you trying to hide?”
Joon-hyuk paused, cigarette halfway to his lips. The brown tattoo streaking across the woman’s thigh was no mere shadow. Jagged edges like a puzzle, branches splayed like lightning. In sunlight it looked abstract, but under fluorescent bulbs, on crumpled sheets, it seemed to be devouring something relentlessly.
“Nothing to hide. I just like how it looks.”
Ha-yeon stubbed out the cigarette with her toe. Voice stripped of laughter. She always said the same thing. Because it’s pretty.
But Joon-hyuk had seen it: where the ink began, a sliver of black scar occasionally seeped between brown and skin.
The scent crouching behind the ink
At first Joon-hyuk hadn’t noticed—how Ha-yeon averted her eyes whenever she undressed, how she could only stretch her legs in darkness. Her fingers constantly skimmed the tattoo, as if checking something. No one asked what she was confirming; the gesture read as sensual. Desire began here. Ignorance was the purest aphrodisiac.
The brown tattoo merely drew the border of “something unseen,” and the urge to rummage beyond it grew like a snowball. Joon-hyuk imagined what lay beneath. A man’s name? The residue of a love effaced by time?
It wasn’t curiosity. It was the craving to excavate another’s wound. That craving collided with the law of taboo: the less you’re allowed to know, the more it hurts. Still, Joon-hyuk asked.
The name the past had caged her with
“…is this someone’s name?”
February 2023, a motel in Jeju. While Ha-yeon showered, Joon-hyuk gingerly opened the bedside drawer. An old diary lay inside. On the first page: Under the apple tree – July 12, 2018.
“I opened it again today. This time, I have to finish it. I pressed the ink hard over the clear letters. I’ve decided to erase Min-su. His name will never stay on my body.”
Min-su. No twenty-eight-word explanation followed. One page had been torn; through the ragged tear, the phrase do not forgive floated like scattered ash.
Joon-hyuk’s breath stopped. This wasn’t a diary. It was evidence.
Ha-yeon returned, toweling her hair. She knew at once what he had found. Her pupils quivered—terror, yet also an eternal inability to bury it.
“…did you read it?”
He nodded. Ha-yeon slipped the diary from his hand and laid her palm over the tattoo.
“It’s here. Still alive.”
The whisper of the scar that calls him
Why do we stare more deeply at a wounded person’s tattoo? Psychologist Clara Monroe said: We feed our own hunger by watching another’s trauma. But that hunger is never sated, because a secret becomes whole only when it vanishes.
Ha-yeon’s tattoo did not hide the secret; it was a decoy. She knew the name Min-su would never disappear, yet tried to make it invisible. From the moment Joon-hyuk realized this, her body turned into another piece of evidence.
She had never forgotten Min-su. Every night the tattoo seemed to swell, as though living. Whenever she touched it, she repeated the word killed. Min-su—and the shameful self she carried.
Joon-hyuk loved her. But that love now contained one more secret. He wanted to clutch her, to overwrite that secret with himself. The urge was primal: the wish to erase another’s past and occupy the void.
Beneath the ink, a story still unfinished
April 2024, a piercing studio in Seoul. Joon-hyuk sat in an empty chair; Ha-yeon had left the night before. She wanted to overlay the tattoo with a new color—something beyond brown.
Joon-hyuk understood at last. No one could erase Min-su. Yet the attempt to erase would continue. The names Ha-yeon and Joon-hyuk, like the tattoo, would be carved anew.
When you touch another person’s wound, which of your own hungers are you calling out to?