You stand before me a canvas, a book of flesh and sinew. Upon your skin, once so bare, multitudes has history etched. You carry your biography with you wherever you go, you wear it like a cloak, sometimes with pride, some with shame, but it never leaves you.

A hundred pencils have drawn upon you. Some sharp, some blunt, some yet burning or caustic. Friends and foes both have left their signatures on you, be it by accident or design. Ink. Steel. Fire, sunlight. Time itself.

There is nothing to be drawn from a blank book; no stories are told that haven't been passed on. Where illness warped the skin, the surgeon's scalpel sliced it healed. The freshest cuts upon your limbs are years old, and remain as a memory, foggy at best. You have seen and experienced much. You have known hardship, and you may even carry it with you, but when I look at you, when I really look with an artist's eyes, what do I see? The resilience of a survivor, an old tree trunk that has faced both lightning and the edge of the woodcutter's axe, but still stands tall amidst the forest.

Because flesh is malleable. It stitches itself back together when cut and it heals when harmed, and when the wound is deep enough, it leaves behind a story and a statement of its survival. A challenge to that which failed to destroy it. It leaves behind a scar.

Punctures, burns, seams and stitches; pitted, keloid, or hypertrophic. A life lived is a life conquered.

Beauty--I don't know what beauty is, but I have seen the ugliness of the world, and it has never been of the flesh. What I know of is power, of leylines, of sigils, of scars. I know of landscapes of a million marks, of mazes of lines and blanks, hills and valleys, and the hollows between them. I know of closing my eyes and picturing the negative space between them, and what it says. Of those things, I know. And I see the perfect patterns of imperfection, the charms and gris-gris, the crosses, the fairy rings. Have you ever noticed how the flesh shields you after it heals?

When you placed yourself upon my table, I felt humbled. The work of artists greater than I rest upon your skin, and still I must add to this quilt. May my humble signature serve you well, and bring you closer to your truth.

May it heal, but not seamlessly.

May it leave a scar.