Four (plus one) tattoos, by Isis and Brevisse

Title: Four tattoos they didn't get (and one they did)
Author: Isis (isiscolo)
Illustrator: Brevisse (brevisse)
Notes: Gen, PG, 1400 words. Sort of spoilers for Return 1. Illustrations are fairly small and should not cause dial-up users anguish. Thanks to sageness for beta-reading, and to painless_j for the Cyrillic.


"What do you think?" asked Mitch delightedly, holding out his arm for John's inspection. The tattoo covered his inner forearm, just below the elbow: SURVIVOR above, AFGHANISTAN below, with a map in the middle overlaid with an assault rifle.

"Who did this? Ahmed?" He was a tattoo artist in the souk where the men went sometimes to buy tobacco and cheap gifts for their girlfriends back home. He must have been there only because of the American soldiers; John was pretty sure that Islam prohibited tattoos.

"Yeah. Me and Dex and Mac got them all done together. Gave us a group discount. You wanna get one, you tell him you're with us, okay?"

"Yeah, sure," said John, but there was no way in hell he was going to get fucking Afghanistan permanently on his arm. Maybe Mitch wanted to remember it when the war was over and he was back in Nebraska or wherever, but John was here to do a job, and when that job was over he was going to put it behind him. Besides, putting 'survivor' on your skin before it was a done deal smacked of tempting fate. Not that he'd say that to Mitch.

Mitch went back to Nebraska in a military casket. And John never did get that tattoo.



Elizabeth had tried to explain it wasn't a vacation, it was work, but her friends had shaken their heads and laughed. "That makes it even better. An all-expense-paid trip to Tonga. Wish I'd get sent there instead of Houston," said Lynn, and the rest of them raised their glasses and toasted Tonga.

Hah, thought Elizabeth grimly, as she pasted a smile on her face and nodded to her counterpart, the Honorable George Lolohea. The small, poorly-ventilated room stank of the combined sweat of the half-dozen negotiators; they did the real work here in the cement-block government building while the diplomats chattered about inconsequentialities over hors d'oeuvres and wine.

When Lolohea rolled up his sleeves, Elizabeth noticed the tattoo on his upper arm, graceful swirls of black peeking out from under the cloth. "An interesting design," she said.

"Ah! You like it?" His broad face broke into a grin as he pushed the cloth farther up so she could see the entire elaborate tattoo, spirals and dots encircling his arm like a wide bracelet. "It is traditional."

"It's stunning. I imagine it must have taken quite some time."

"Oh, yes. Many hours. And a bit more painful than our negotiations," he added. "Perhaps after we finish here, I will take you to the artist and you will get a souvenir of your time in Tonga."

She shook her head, smiling. "The best souvenir for me would be a completed trade agreement."

She got the trade agreement; she didn't get the tattoo.



It wasn't until Rodney had been at Kuybyshev Airbase for nearly three months that he found out about the betting pool. "You actually thought I couldn't take it? Come on, guys, I'm from Canada. Our weather is just as lousy, but we've got a better hockey team."

"Is not that we thought you couldn't take it," said Dr. Kovalev. "Is that we thought Dr. Markov would throw you out."

"Ah. Well," said Rodney. To be honest, at first he had been hoping she'd throw him out, because it was completely unfair that he, the finest mind of his generation, was stuck working on naquadah generators in Siberia. The food was every bit as bad as he'd feared, and the tooling equipment was straight out of the 1950s, clunky outmoded machinery that took hours to calibrate and only a few minutes to vibrate out of the necessary tolerance band.

But after a while, outwitting the equipment became almost a sort of game. It was like playing MacGyver, building particle regulators out of teaspoons and paper clips, and even though it was often exasperating, he had to admit that when he succeeded - and he always succeeded, eventually - it was also fun. Plus, Svetlana Markov might have been no Sam Carter, but she was fairly intelligent and had truly impressive legs.

"If you last for one year," said Kovalev, "you get this." He rolled up his sleeve, revealing a tattoo on his arm: hand-drawn letters and numbers surrounding the simple but recognizable shape of a bear. Rodney squinted at the Cyrillic characters above the series of dates, sounding them out to himself; he had too many things to do to actually learn Russian.

"Kuybyshev 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 - who'd you piss off to get stuck here for four years?"

Kovalev gave him a flinty smile. "Does not matter how you get here. Only that you are."

"As if I'd want any reminder of this place on my arm," said Rodney, shuddering.

But then the Goa'uld attacked Earth, and Rodney was recalled to the SGC. So he didn't last a year, after all.



Carson had only been at the Antarctic outpost for a week when he noticed the tattoos. The woman who served the food at the cafeteria had one; so did the two Marines who guarded the laboratory complex, and the man who kept the heater going, and the fellow who maintained the roadway between the main building and the dormitories.

Finally he got up his courage, and as Lily was dishing him out some stew he indicated her arm. "So what's that, then?"

She laughed and rolled up her sleeve the rest of the way. Now that he could see it clearly, he realized it was a winking penguin with a sign saying '300!' "You want to join the club?"

"Club?"

"The three-hundred degree club. When the temperature hits minus one hundred, we crank up the sauna to two hundred, you get naked and sit in it until you're good and hot, and then run outside and we take your picture. You do it, you're eligible for the tattoo."

"Minus - minus one hundred?" stammered Carson. He supposed she must mean Fahrenheit; still, that was colder than - he closed his eyes as he calculated it in his head - seventy below. Good Lord. Even with sauna-warmed skin, that was courting frostbite and hypothermia.

"Not for me, thank you," he said, and carried his dinner to a table. With luck, by the time the temperature dropped that low, he'd be back in Scotland.

As it turned out, when the temperature dipped to minus one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, he wasn't in Scotland. But he wasn't in Antarctica, either.



Charlie looked up as the doorbell jingled and four people walked in to his shop. Mid 30s, maybe, straight-looking types, but with hair too long to be from any of the military bases. If he had to guess, it was going to be the man with black hair - maybe something religious, like a cross. "Help you?"

"This is a tattoo parlor, so obviously -"

"Rodney!" interrupted the black-haired man, with a warning glance toward the man who'd spoken first. Then he looked back at Charlie. "But yes, we'd like a tattoo."

"We? All of you?"

"All of us. Elizabeth?"

"John? Oh, right." The woman blinked, then nodded, and reached into her pocket to pull out a folded piece of paper. "Sorry. We just got back - back in town. We've been away. It's been a difficult few days."

"That's for certain," said the third man, who sounded kind of British.

Charlie looked at the design on the paper. It was…weird. Like an A without its crossbar, and connect-the-dots shapes on each side. Nothing he'd ever seen before. "Is this from a game or something?"

"Game?" said Elizabeth.

"You know, like Warcraft? Final Fantasy?"

"Yes," said John, at the same time as Rodney said, "No."

"Yes and no," said Elizabeth. "It's…sort of a game?"

"Oh, please." Rodney stabbed a finger at the drawing. "That is the point of origin for Earth, and that is the point of origin for -"

"Rodney!"

"As if he'd even understand," muttered Rodney.

Elizabeth put her hand on Rodney's arm. "It's a symbol that's meaningful to us. It stands for - well, a place we miss."

"That we might never return to," said the man with the accent.

The four of them looked at each other, sharing a glance that Charlie couldn't decipher. Then John looked at him. "I guess you could say that it stands for home."

---

Author's note: the constellation-like symbol overlaid on the Earth origin is the symbol for the point of origin of Atlantis, unique to the Stargate there.