[Reaction]
He's spent enough time in tattoo parlors that it doesn't seem weird, at first. The smell is right: that clean, blue soap and alcohol wipes and nitrile gloves. The smell of leather furniture and old books, but instead of pages of flash art from the Sailor Jerry era there are runes on the wall, and he can feel the tingle of old magic against the insides of his nose. And instead of the steady buzz in his ears (that he'd once described as "a thousand angry bees eating your flesh"), it's just the faintly-hollow 'tap tap tap' that doesn't make any sense with the rest of it.
The poison, when it burbles up his throat, it looks like liquid charcoal and it tastes worse. It's sour, and grainy when it coats his teeth. His bicep stings worse than he remembers from his last tattoo, worse even than the panther's head that stretches over the side of his neck. The artist's voice in his head sounds like somebody he recognizes from the distance of an old tunnel dug through the earth.
It's only when he reels back from the projectile force of thick, black liquid drooling out from his between his lips into the toilet bowl that he realizes he's in his own bathroom, not a stranger's shop with the tang of magic in the air. And he sits there for a while, panting, then tugging his hoodie's sleeve over the back of his hand and wiping it over his lips.
"Shit," he mumbles, feeling a bead of sweat crawling down his throat. "What the fuck?"