Blowout
A young punk in 1980s Manchester finds himself awakened to new feelings during a tattoo done by his charismatic best friend.
Cis M/cis M, oral sex. Detailed depiction of tattooing throughout.
Disclaimer: this story depicts a tattoo being performed in a DIY unsanitary setting without the appropriate equipment. Do not try this at home.
This all happened back in ‘79… no, I reckon it was just turned 1980, when I was living in Manchester in this old squat on the outskirts of Collyhurst with a group of other young ratbags who ran in the same circles. Most people called it the Solar Anus Squat, or S.A.S, named after the band who set the whole thing up, even though the squat ended up lasting a lot longer than the band itself. We all tried to be prepared for needing to move on at any point, living in constant fear of raids by the filth or one of the punk-hating gangs in the city who always threatened to set fire to our digs with us inside. Still, we got fond of the old place. It was home for a lot of us. We tried to keep it looking normal and tidy out the front so no coppers or owt would suspect, but inside was an explosion of emulsion paint and spray paint on every wall, band and movie posters pasted directly onto the chipboard and a jumble of furniture scavenged from skips.
The bloke I thought of as the closest I had to a best mate at the time was a graffiti-er called Scratch. Supposedly he’d been in a duo called Scratch ’n’ Sniff with a lad whose nickname was based on him pushing snortable substances and who now was doing a stint in Strangeways but I’d never had any evidence that such a man had ever existed. It was common for punks to build themselves a mythology- I myself had even lied once or twice when asked the origin of my own nickname, saying that it was because I had once floored a club bouncer with one punch. Actually my name Rocky had developed from Rocket, named after the Hermes Rocket, which was the portable typewriter I had acquired to type up the text in the zine I helped run. It had taken me a while to gain my nickname, my mates going through a variety of variations on my last name, and then references to my height like Beanpole, Lanky, Lamppost. Probably a sign of my lack of an actual interesting personality. When I was finally given my lasting nickname it felt like a true sign of belonging to the community, and to the S.A.S.
Scratch and me had met through doing creative shit for Solar Anus when they were first setting out. He did these bold freehand drawings in thick marker pen and I collected old magazines and cut out words and photos, sitting with a stick of Pritt and organising collages which we combined with Scratch’s art to make the flyers for the shows. Eventually we formed a kind of collective with other punks in the area to make flyers for a lot of the local bands and DIY events, taking them to the nearest library to photocopy a stack of them for distribution.
One of the notable things about Scratch compared to the rest of us was that he wasn’t really into punk music, mainly doing art for the bands because he was pals with them rather than because he was a fan. But if you took one look at him you’d never deny he was a punk. I always thought I was being individual, with my old leather jacket that I’d painstakingly hammered studs into by hand, but I’d still based that look on other people around the scene. There might be variation but there was an essential punk uniform in the Sex Pistols style. Nothing wrong with that: we wanted to recognise each other as part of the family. But Scratch had his own look, going around all the charity shops and picking up whatever he thought looked cool, and it always did look cool on him somehow. I knew I’d never be able to pull that off. The intended gender, age, that didn’t matter. Sometimes he’d wear plasticky glittery jewellery made for little girls or a long flowery nightie that once belonged to some old lady and still had a whiff of Yardley’s lavender talc. He had this old coat, this big old beige Granddad mac, that he’d painted all over with mad patterns. He was always changing his look, which was nowhere more visible than his hair. When I first met him it was styled up in huge gravity defying spikes but at this particular moment he was wearing it natural, a sleek spherical Afro, except that it was dyed acid green.
Of course punk wasn’t just about the music. The music was the symptom, not the cause. We were all united by the general dissatisfaction of the early Thatcher years, living in the heart of urban decay, among slum housing that was torn down and left with empty craters. Tensions were building everywhere, a deep bitter unhappiness with the government, all of it. We weren’t just trying to hit back against the world but trying to build our own better society. That was the main thing that brought us all together. We shared an outlook on the world, of anger and of hope.
Anyway, enough of the manifesto. The main thing to know is that my mate Scratch had talked me into letting him give me a tattoo. It wouldn’t have taken much, I idolised the guy. He could have convinced me to cut off a body part for him I reckon. So there I was, wearing just an old t-shirt I’d hand stencilled with a Buzzcocks logo and my tightie whities. It’s not as grotty as it sounds: we did actually wash, unless the water metre was empty and nobody had topped it up. I was sat on the bathroom floor, my faded red mohawk drooping over where yesterday’s gel had worn off, while Scratch crouched in front of me fiddling with his homemade tattoo machine.
I was a little too hungover from a basement gig the night before to be properly nervous, but I did get a bit anxious when he got the thing going with a loud angry buzz. I should have been more scared of infection, given the fact he had only sterilised it by boiling it in a pan of water on the hob, but I was more just bricking it from the thought of the pain. This was my first tattoo and I didn’t like the look of the needle he had fashioned himself from a sharpened metal guitar string. I wasn’t a massive stranger to needles, having pierced my own ears with a sewing needle a couple of years ago, but I hadn’t loved doing that either. I tended to try and hide my squeamishness because all of that didn’t seem very punk.
Despite my concern, I did like the idea. Not only because tattoos were objectively cool but because it was going to be an extra layer of bonding with Scratch, especially since he would be inking me with his favourite design- one he’d already tattooed onto his own leg. Matching tattoos seemed like another level up from any kind of blood brothers bonding ritual. The design itself was his main tattoo tag: a dancing little guy that was shaped into an abstract S for Scratch. He did other stuff sometimes: topical; angry; slogans and caricatures, but this was his signature. Little bit Keith Haring by way of The Beat Girl if you want to imagine it, though I’m never accusing him of being derivative, especially since I reckon he was doing his designs before he’d ever heard of either of them. You could see it sprayed all over certain neighbourhoods in Manchester and Salford, on walls and telephone boxes. Whenever he needed a slash outside a club he usually ended up carefully pissing a rough approximation of that same design up on the walls. He’d got dead good at it and it was weirdly mesmeric seeing it drip filthily down the bricks afterwards, slowly distorting the image into something new.
It wasn’t the most hygienic how he used the same razor I’d shaved the sides of my head with the day before to shave the tattoo site, gently sliding the blade over the top of my thigh to remove the hair, but to his credit he did then clean the skin carefully with some toilet roll soaked in alcohol before starting. I leaned back, fumbling in a tin that once held sweets and extracting a rollie, lighting up and watching Scratch dip the end of the needle in a little pot of ink. He’d told me he’d got the motor for the machine from an old tape machine, and I could see the small metal cylinder stuck on to what looked like a bent toothbrush with the head cut off. No idea where he’d learned to make it but I wasn’t surprised. He knew all kinds of random stuff like that.
“Try and hold your leg still, alright?” he told me, scooping a lump of Vaseline out of a pot on the floor and smearing it over where the tattoo would be.
He’d drawn out the design with a green pen, although that seemed mainly to show me what it was going to look like since I reckoned he’d drawn that little doodle so many times he could freehand it without a guide. I took a deep breath and tilted my head back against the cracked tiles, closing my eyes and hoping I seemed nonchalant rather than scared. I didn’t want to see the moment the needle went in.
There was a moment of buzzing before I felt the sudden sharp pressure of the needle penetrating. It didn’t hurt as much as I’d feared, not compared to the dreaded TB vaccine or other childhood inoculations. I guess it didn’t go anywhere near as deep, just poking in and out of the top couple of layers of skin. I relaxed, taking a drag of my cigarette and exhaling it through my nostrils, allowing myself to open my eyes again. Scratch glanced up and parted his mouth pointedly, tilting his chin up. I understood what he was after, positioning the fag between his lips so he could have some without dirtying the hands which were occupied on my leg- one holding the machine and the other stretching the skin taut between his fingertips. He sucked in, breathing out in a slow lazy puff of smoke from the side of his mouth, vaguely away from where he was tattooing.
I had picked the thigh because it would be easy to hide if it turned out shit. Maybe deep down there was still part of me that thought I might end up needing a proper job one day and back then tattoos made you basically unhireable in most places. I’d also thought iit might be less painful in that spot since I was thin as a rake at the time and that was one area where I had the slightest bit of padding. I hadn’t really appreciated how weird it might feel to have my friend’s face hovering less than a foot above my dick while he focused on what he was doing.
We’d left the bathroom door open and had the battered old communal tape deck blaring out my bootleg cassette of The Fall’s first album. I had a whole stack of tapes, mostly recorded off the original LPs owned by other people, giving them an extra layer of noise and texture. In later years I would experiment with mixing my own music by recording on a multitrack machine, putting together snippets of John Cooper Clarke and Joy Division, recording and rerecording, sounding rougher each time it went through the process, further removed from the original. To this day I still find something comfortably nostalgic about a cassette tape, something that CDs and later digital tracks just don’t capture.
The sound of the music washed over me, and as the needle buzzed through my flesh it felt as though I was feeling the rhythm of the guitar thrum through my body. The tattoo machine seemed to be in perfect time with the music, frenetic and insistent. It hurt but it wasn’t a bad hurt. There was something strangely pleasurable about it, which was weird for me because I was a bit of a wuss as I said before. I knew about the sadomasochism stuff since that was a big part of the punk subculture and plenty of people I knew were into it. That just wasn’t me, or so I’d thought.
Scratch paused to wipe away the extra ink and I glanced down to see there was also a bit of blood. He had made much less progress than I’d expected from what I could feel: just a few inches of straight black line, but it looked pretty good to my untrained eyes considering his lack of professional equipment. He dipped again and put the needle to my skin, the drone of the machine changing slightly in pitch as it met flesh. It felt like a slow shallow cut, the rapid movement of the thing making it too difficult to differentiate each stab of the metal. It stung more than anything, the wiping of the ink sometimes more unpleasant than the actual needle, especially when the soap got into it. I took another drag from the cig and held it for Scratch to do the same.
“How’s it feeling?”
“Yeah, alright. Smarts a bit but I don’t mind it.”
“I try to be gentle,” he grinned, giving me a light flick on the knee with one painted fingernail.
I wondered if this was where he’d got his nickname, since it did feel like he was scratching the ink into me with a sharp point, like getting all scratched up running through brambles. The needle vibrated its way around a curve in the design, sliding to a different part of my thigh. This spot was apparently more sensitive and I had to fight the urge to pull away, the muscle shaking hard of its own volition. It felt as though the needle was going much deeper than I knew it was, like I was feeling it in my actual bone.
The cassette whirred and clicked, running on a few seconds of dead tape at the end of the recording. I gestured with the fag end for Scratch to let me get up, stubbing it out in an ash tray that somebody had nicked from a pub and hobbling over to the tape player. I was more burdened by pins and needles than the tattoo-in-progress, which I couldn’t even feel when it wasn’t being actually carved into my skin. At first I was going to just flip the tape to Side Two but I changed my mind and popped it out to replace it with something else. I said that Scratch didn’t have much interest in music and he didn’t really, not compared to the rest of us, but I knew he preferred some over others. So I put on Germfree Adolescents by the X-Ray Spex since I knew he shared my warm feelings for Poly Styrene.
Of course one of the biggest constant daily arguments around the house was what music we wanted on. Some music was banned outright. Popular music like David Essex or what have you, no chance. You’d get laughed out of the place. Ska was a divisive subject. Even some punk records were dismissed as being by so-called posers. Several S.A.S frequenters objected to X-Ray Spex fiercely on the grounds that they sounded too much like Londoners, and London itself often seemed to be seen as an enemy of the whole movement, a gestalt representation of Thatcherism and monarchy. London was shit, the South was shit, anywhere outside Manchester was shit. Then again some hated a massive chunk of the Manc scene for being poncey and intellectual and way too bourgeois when punk should be a movement of the people.
And even back then there were those who said punk was dead, that everything coming out now was trite and unoriginal and the best days were behind us. They reckoned it was all too mainstream now and the real heart had gone out of it. Some said that anybody who got a record deal and definitely anybody who got played on the radio wasn’t really punk- they were too manufactured and not real enough to have the true spirit. Sometimes it seemed what it all came down to was people trying to give their own subjective opinions weight by attaching them to some argument about what was authentic and what represented the spirit of punk most accurately. Basically a lot of them just wanted something to argue about. Though there was the nasty side of it all too. I met plenty of cunts who hated any band with women in it, or who loudly went on about how punk should be English, and by English they meant white. I always got a bit suspicious when somebody’s opening argument was how 2 Tone had ruined punk music.
When I got back to the bathroom Scratch was washing some of the ink off his hands. It might be horrifying nowadays from a hygiene perspective that we didn’t have gloves or owt like that, though I guess that was the least of the risks what with the homemade tattoo gun and all the rest of it, and I don’t know where he got the ink but I doubt that was the proper stuff either. But he made do. I got back into position and he got back to work. The buzz of the tattoo machine had gone from threatening to be almost soothing. I found I’d almost missed the sharp penetration of the needle as it stabbed its way into me once again.
“Get your legs apart for me mate,” Scratch said with a cheeky smirk, “Bit more, come on, I need to get to that bit there. Hang on, let’s try it this way…”
Careful not to touch the bathroom floor, he shuffled between my spread legs to get to the part of the design that spread out onto my inner thigh. I was suddenly beginning to regret picking this part of my body for the tattoo. I was also regretting these tight briefs, especially since the coverage was not complete. My main bits and pieces were all contained but literally only just, and tufts of pubes were sticking out of the leg holes: my mohawk didn’t continue down there, I can tell you! I could’ve sworn Scratch glanced just for a second at my crotch as he settled on his knees between my legs, starting up the machine again and bending over my thigh to continue the line he’d started inking. There was a dirty smeared mirror up above the toilet at the other side of the room and if I tilted my head just right I could alter the small part of the reflection shown in it. I could see my own face, smeared old cheap kohl around the eyes, floppy mohawk, dopey expression. Then if I moved my head up a bit I could see the back of Scratch’s head which from this angle looked like it was bobbing right between my legs. Definitely looked like something else was going on, or maybe that was just my filthy mind.
The needle felt rougher than it had. I knew that was because of the softer, more sensitive skin of my inner thigh, but it felt like each punch of the sharp metal was tearing up my flesh. But at the same time… well, like I said, it was sensitive! Some part of my brain must have been getting its wires crossed because I could feel myself… stiffen, if you know what I mean. In a very awkward place. I hadn’t quite got a stalk on but, you know, I was halfway there. A semi, you could say. Would’ve been alright if I was wearing some of my looser keks that could disguise what was going on, but this underwear left nothing to the imagination. I closed my eyes and tried to will it back down before Scratch noticed, grateful at how focused he was on the tattoo. Until he wasn’t. I looked down to check if my bulge was still quite as bulging, just as he looked down at it at the same time. I was looking, and he was looking, and we both knew each other had seen it.
“Hey mate, it happens to us all. Totally natural reaction, don’t worry about it.”
Because it was Scratch talking, I believed it. He was a cheeky get sometimes but like, right smart, and mature, and the rest. I had other mates in the house, like the band’s on-again-off-again drummer, who would have found the whole thing hilarious. He would probably have told everybody he met for months about it- Rocky got a stiffy getting his first tattoo, what a bender! But Scratch… I guess he’d seen way weirder shit than that so probably it genuinely just didn’t bother him at all. And if it did, he was nice enough to stay quiet about it.
I didn’t say owt: didn’t want to let on how embarrassed I was. Just wanted to pretend it weren’t happening and wait for it to be done. Could’ve called it a day but I didn’t think of that. Didn’t want to seem like a softie who couldn’t handle pain. Even though softness wasn’t the issue, as it were, and it wasn’t getting any softer neither. The machine buzzed its way along my leg, and Scratch’s fingers pressing the skin taut felt like they were buzzing and all. It was getting dead sore by this point, like maybe the adrenaline was wearing off and my body was beginning to realise it wasn’t meant to get stabbed hundreds of times with a needle. Maybe the needle was getting blunt from all that stabbing. Anyway, you’d think that all that pain would make my cock shrink back down to where it belonged but the little sod had betrayed me and I was now sporting a raging hard-on, a visible curve in my underpants. I hadn’t realised how thin the fabric was until I could see the actual shape of my bellend accentuated through the white cotton. Call me Genesis P-Orridge because my gristle was throbbing alright. Sorry, cheesy joke. Truth is, mad as it sounds, I still feel a bit flustered just talking about it and remembering what it all felt like, even after forty odd years.
Where was I? Right, right. So I had one hell of a hard-on. Plus the muscles in my leg were also rebelling, twitching all over the place like I was getting one of them tests at the doctors where they smack you with that little hammer.
“Doing all right?” Scratch asked, and I couldn’t tell if he was trying to be funny.
“Yeah mate, sound, yeah,” I muttered, automatically pressing a hand down on my leg to stop my thigh from jerking up to knee him in the face.
I glanced down at the tattoo the next time he wiped away the extra ink. He had finished most of the bit right on my inner thigh which was a blessed relief but there was still a whole other curve of the S to go, the tail bit which was also the bottom half of the legs of the little man.
“Starting to hurt a bit now?” he asked just as the needle bit back into my flesh.
“Like being stung by a big bastard wasp.”
He laughed, using his pinky finger to collect more Vaseline and rubbing it over my skin. Even though he was only touching the part that hadn’t even been tattooed yet, I swear down it still felt raw. It felt like it hurt more if I looked directly at the needle stabbing in and out, so I looked at the rest of the tattoo so far. It looked pretty decent considering the set up, though most of the tattoos my mates had were prison pokes or done with a similar machine to Scratch. Still, the lines weren’t too wobbly and it looked as sharp and neat as any of the graffiti he did. Way better than when he pissed it onto a wall for sure. Although now I was just visualising him pissing this onto my leg, the hot burn of the needle actually being a hot stream of piss hitting my skin. Nasty thought, innit? Should’ve calmed down the raging horn that had me in its grips. So why was I feeling my cock pulse desperately in my pants, pre cum starting to soak through where the head was pressed up on the material?
“You know what’s a good way to cope with tattoo pain?”
“Amphetamines?” I suggested with a small wince as he went over a spot twice to even it out.
“Well, yeah. But failing that… a good wank. And it looks like you need one. You could do it now if you want.”
His head was bent forwards so I couldn’t see his face. It felt like he must be having me on, but he wasn’t really that type of guy. But still, I didn’t understand.
“I don’t usually do it with an audience,” I said carefully, still looking out for the trick.
“I’d give you a hand but it wouldn’t be hygienic.”
“You’ve got a mouth don’t you?” I laughed, telling myself I was just going along with his weird joke, but feeling my heart pound like mad in my chest.
“Fair point. Can’t get my hands dirty but you can stick it in if you want. I’ve been told I’m good.”
He tilted his head to one side so that he could look directly up at me. His gaze was unflinching, daring. I felt as though I’d stopped breathing.
You have to understand, these were dangerous times. Kids were getting gay bashed every day, and this was even before the AIDS panic of later years. If it had been literally anybody else I’d worry this was bait and if I fell for it I’d get beaten to a pulp. But I’d always known Scratch to be fiercely pro gay rights, and liberation of all kinds. A lot of the clubs in the late 70s in particular didn’t let punks in, and we often ended up in gay bars and clubs. We’d made friends with the queens and shared space (and sometimes clothes) with the leather daddies. There was common ground, there was solidarity. Did you know that ‘punk’ used to mean the same thing as ‘faggot’? It did feel like we were cut from the same cloth. There was still loads of homophobia in the scene, don’t get me wrong, especially from the punks who hated that we were often labelled as gay ourselves.
One time me and Scratch were smoking in this little ginnel round the back of one of the basement bars and these two lads came round the corner. Fred Perry shirts, trainers, jeans, wedge haircuts. We ran into their lot all the time. Casuals, town boys, what the Scousers called scallies. Their main interest other than football was hating punks and we hated them right back. If I’d have been on my own I would have been shitting bricks, but I wasn’t too worried with Scratch by my side. He was a fair bit shorter than me but had this easy confidence that I never did.
“Queers,” one of the Perry Boys said behind his hand, pretending to cough.
“What was that?” Scratch asked politely, leaning back against the wall.
“Nothing, mate.” the other one said, nudging his pal to keep walking, in a way that indicated he did not like the look of Scratch one bit.
“I think he called us poofs,” Scratch informed me cheerfully, cracking his knuckles in front of his chest.
“I said ‘queers’,” that first lad said indignantly.
“Oh yeah that was it. Well, here we are. Did you want something, love? A snog maybe? Or something more physical?”
With that, Scratch casually took off the chain he was wearing around his neck that day: not your Argos catalogue Cuban link little silver chain necklace but a real steel hardware chain that he had somehow attached, as a pendant, the hubcap he’d ripped off a Porsche. As the two boys looked at each other uncertainly, deciding whether they wanted a scrap or not, Scratch started to swing the chain around in his hand, the hubcap whirling dangerously around, looking like a weapon you definitely wouldn’t want to be on the other side of. Even though I was nervous at the thought of the fight, I couldn’t help but admire how cool he made it look. I would probably have belted myself in the forehead if I attempted that same move.
“Nah. Not worth our time, pal.” one of them insisted after a moment, and I swear they walked off at double speed after that.
Once I’d thought that he was just desperate for a bruising, antagonising those pricks like that, but in time I got to know that he was actually pretty good at knowing how to defuse that kind of situation.
“With bullies like that,” he once told me, “You have to seem like you’re up for it. They’re looking for weakness, to give someone a battering, not for a fair fight. Course, sometimes that doesn’t work. Like if you’re outnumbered, or if they’ve got knives on them. In that case, leg it. Fuck your pride.”
I got the impression he was speaking from long experience. The colour of his skin would have made him a target even before he started wearing car parts as jewellery and dyeing his hair bright colours. Although it was hard to imagine there was a time when he would have expressed himself conventionally. Even among our people he stood out. Vibrant, unique, charismatic. He looked like somebody that should be snapped up by some artist as a muse. If we’d been in America I reckon Andy Warhol would have been all over him.
I’d wondered on several occasions over the course of our friendship if he might be into blokes. Not just because of his fashion sense. Something about him, how he was with other men. Comfortable. I’d tried not to wonder the same about myself. In fact, I’d been not wondering it about myself for some time. It had been going quite well up until now.
Scratch was reloading the needle with ink to carry on tattooing, and for a moment I thought that I’d hesitated too long, that the deeply charged moment between us had fizzled out. But then I noticed how he’d lowered his head, very deliberately tilting his face up in the same way as when he’d been hinting for a drag on my cigarette. Lips slightly parted, and I could see the pink of his tongue caught between his teeth. He glanced up at me with brown doe eyes, and I realised I’d never noticed how long his eyelashes were before. As though hypnotised, barely aware I was doing it, I reached for the waistband of my underwear and pulled it down. In answer, Scratch slowly lowered himself to lay down on his stomach, between my legs, propped up on his elbows with his arms awkwardly to one side. He was wearing an old t-shirt with Mr Wimpy on it which he’d cut into a crop top, now riding up until it barely covered his nipples, his skin against the cold tiles of the floor.
He was so close that I thought that my cock might smack him in the face. It certainly sprang out like a pouncing snake, aching hard and curving up towards my belly. Scratch didn’t look down, his eyes still on mine, but he opened his mouth in readiness as I took myself in hand and guided the tip between his lips. He kept his head perfectly still, allowing me to feed him my cock inch by inch. The angle wasn’t perfect, but I didn’t care. It felt magic. His eyes flicked back to the tattoo, and the buzzing needle returned to my skin. He was right- the hot velvety sensation of his mouth around my prick was tempering the pain. Or rather, the pain was now mixing with the pleasure and intensifying it. It was impossible to tell.
I was weirdly into the way he was no longer paying me any attention and fully concentrating on the tattoo again. It made the whole thing feel right casual. He was still able to multitask though, hollowing his cheeks and pressing his tongue up against the shaft. He definitely knew what he was doing. I mean, I could tell he was experienced by the way he didn’t gag when I experimentally slid in a little deeper, bumping up against the roof of his mouth, just stopping short from his throat. He didn’t look away from the tattoo, just slightly shifting angle to tip his head back further, and I swear down I could feel him relax his throat muscles in readiness. I curved one hand around the nape of his neck, feeling a flutter of excitement as I eased in, guiding him to deepthroat my cock. The sensation was so intense it was almost unbearable. I threw my head back, the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling right above me searing into my retinas. It felt like I was going to explode, and not in a euphemistic sense but literally as though my head was about to go up like a firework.
Scratch had lifted up the needle, probably so he didn’t accidentally stab it right in if I jolted him too hard. His forehead was practically against my stomach at this point, me buried balls deep down his gullet, so I don’t think he could see a thing. Even though his mouth felt so good I found that I kind of missed the feeling of the tattoo. I needed that sting to balance out the overwhelming feeling of tight wet heat. Since I was unable to pull back myself with my back already against the wall, I tapped him lightly on the forehead, then gave it a slight push with the tip of my finger. He got the hint and started to slowly pull back. I stared, mesmerised, as inch by inch my glistening hard dick appeared from his mouth.
“Uh, is that enough for you to see to work?” I asked, my voice sounding rough and a little out of breath.
He made an affirmative sort of noise that also sent a wave of vibrations through me and I swore between my teeth and resisted the urge to grab the back of his head and slam right back inside. There was the familiar sound of the machine, and that pain, both sharp and dull, deceptively shallow, unbearable yet intoxicating. My giddy brain did feel kind of high, disengaged from most of my body other than the places where I was receiving this mad kind of dual attention. His needle penetrating my leg, my cock penetrating his mouth, like some proper weird idea of a 69. It was mint.
The angle can’t have been ideal but he seemed to be able to tattoo just as well as he had been doing before. I closed my eyes, listening to the thrum of the music through the doorway as it blended into the sound of the buzzing motor, focusing on relaxing against the pain. My whole thigh felt like a huge bruise by this point, pain levels teetering on the edge between unbearable and enjoyable. Even though I was trying to stay as still and relaxed as possible, Scratch seemed to intuitively know when it tipped over into being too painful. He would pause for a moment, lifting the needle away to give me a moment of relief, and take the opportunity to bob his head down to swallow me deep once more, or sometimes would pull back instead so that he could suck and lick the head of my dick, his tongue swirling and dancing over my skin. On more than one occasion I was convinced I was about to blow, but he seemed to be able to tell how much of that I could take as well, and would return to the needle.
This settled into a rhythm, a pattern, building me up and then stopping and switching. His mouth, his hand, pleasure, pain, over and over again. All smoothed into one by the crackling cassette of guitars that made up the background soundtrack. The cycle of it was getting to the point where I felt half convinced that this was how all sex was meant to be: that it should always have at least some element of pain. I felt as though all my nerves were lighting up like fairy lights, feeling everything through my whole body.
Once again the bite of the needle was working through my skin, feeling as though it was rumbling right to the bone. It felt like it was going on for longer than the previous mini sessions and I found myself breathing hard, trying to simultaneously hold my body still and allow myself to just listen to the music and ignore the pain.
“Thank fuck,” I mumbled when the needle was removed from my body and the machine shuddered into silence, although almost immediately I was beginning to miss the feeling of it.
I didn’t have much time to think about that before Scratch moved from his resting position with my cock half in his mouth, pressing his tongue to the underside of my shaft and licking all the way up the tip before sliding back down all the way, enveloping the whole length in hot tight suction. Even though the machine was silent I could still feel the sting of pain from my punctured skin. As Scratch glanced up at me with wet wide eyes I considered the subject of the tattoo itself in relation to him and the bond we’d built- it had seemed obvious that he’d do his favourite doodle on me, but now I was thinking about how he was essentially marking me with his signature, marking his territory like he did with spray paint or piss. That thought was really fucking sexy.
Scratch had just driven his mouth back down to the base when I unexpectedly found my orgasm hit me like a truck to the gut, exploding down my best friend’s throat in a torrent of hot come that just kept coming, leaving me panting and gripping at his shoulders for support. He didn’t pull away but kept still, swallowing it all down until I collapsed back against the wall with a final shudder and he slowly pulled back to allow my sensitive twitching cock to fall back down against my thigh.
If I could have formed words I would have apologised for the lack of warning, though to be fair I had no warning myself either. In my minute my brain was fucking scrambled and it was a miracle I remembered how to breathe.
I was brought back to reality by a cold wet something, and I realised that Scratch was wiping down my tattoo. I glanced blearily down at the outline of a little man dancing in the shape of an S.
“That’s you all done,” he said cheerfully, as though nothing had happened, other than the slight roughness of his voice from a well-fucked throat.
So yeah. That was my first gay experience, though not my last. In the next few years I’d move to another squat over in Hulme and have a handful of other adventures. But like I said on the app, it’s been a fair few years. A lifetime since then, it feels like. I got married to a girl in the end, in the early 90s, and got a job among the yuppies I used to hate. Everything changed. Now though, it’s the start of another era. I’m learning everything all over again after the divorce, and I’m probably kind of rusty with it all. Times have changed so much since the last time I was on the pull.
If you want another drink we could go back to mine for a nightcap. Maybe… I could show you that old tattoo.
Love and apologies to the Manchester punk scene of the late 70s/early 80s for any inaccuracies. Many thanks to this article by Frank Owen about his own experiences of the time.
