Raleigh did nothing to respond to Raines’ threat of her owing him for the now destroyed tobacco in his pipe other than smirk a bit, still clearly finding what she had done to be rather funny. After a moment she noticed the smirk on Raines’ own face and realized where his gaze was fixed. Rather than straighten up and make an attempt to cover herself, she remained in her position with one hand on either side of the chair, her eyes fixed on his face. It was a strange situation that she seemed to have found herself in this particular evening, and his most recent comment only furthered that. The thought to kiss him again crossed her mind, and she felt herself leaning ever so slightly closer to him before she was brought back to her senses by his question about her tattoos.
”Oh,” she said, realizing that, yes, Raines had seen the tattoos on her arms and shoulders, but he had never seen the ones covering her abdomen, her sides, and her back. His question of whether or not the tattoos had any meaning brought a barrage of memories back to her, but fortunately enough she was in an inebriated enough state where the sadness that some of them brought would be subdued.
She braced herself on the arms of the chair and pushed herself back up into a standing position. She snatched the bottle of rum out of his hands and took a rather impressive gulp before handing it back to him. ”There’s a reason for all of them. Maybe not a special meaning, but there’s a reason… But I don’t know that they’re all that exciting,” she said. Without another word she turned around, her back now to Raines as she stood next to the desk. She crossed her arms and grabbed the hem on either side of the tunic, tossing it onto the desk next to her.
Her back was now completely exposed, and it was covered in a series of intricate patterns and designs. Intermingled throughout the expansive inking on her back seemed to be a rather innumerable amount of scars. ”Up at the top here, just below my neck - I suspect I was ‘round thirteen when I got those ones,” she said, reaching over her shoulder to tap at the top of the ink. ”My parents passed when I was around nine, I think? I was sent to an orphanage, but I was too old for anyone to take me. Not long after my thirteenth birthday, the orphanage sold me to some slavers from Mo’mey,” she began explaining. It didn’t seem as though the memory seemed to be affecting her too much. ”If you look close, you’ll see they’re actually runic symbols - it’s describing where I was purchased and my identifying number, all that kind of thing,” she said.
”Now, just below my shoulder blades, I got those when I was… fifteen, maybe?” she continued. The design in question now seemed to be a pattern of a sun coupled with angel wings and several items that looked like daggers. ”That one was my idea, after I killed the slavers and escaped to Abed,” she said. The lack of emotion in her voice gave way to the fact that she wasn’t overly affected by it any longer. ”I was there for about a year before I made my way to Adeluna, which is where the rest of that one came from,” she said, indicating the designs that covered the rest of her back. They were nautical in nature, finished at the bottom with a design that seemed to be like waves.
She crossed an arm across her chest, and turned around, showing how the wave design wrapped all the way around her sides and her stomach. Her side also had runic writing scrawled across her ribs and hips, along with some of the same faded scarring that was across her back. She stopped when she was facing Raines again, leaning back against the desk somewhat. ”I worked on the docks in Adeluna, scrubbing ships and loading cargo, once I got there,” she said. She shrugged her shoulders for a moment, her arm still folded across her. ”Did that for… three years, before I came across you and took up with your crew. I knew I belonged on a ship, I knew I belonged on the sea - I was just waiting for the right captain, and you were it,” she said rather simply, as though it was a fact and not something she believed. ”Two years later and you’re still putting up with me, so I guess it was the right choice,” she said with a laugh.
Her laughter died off slightly as it dawned upon her just what sort of predicament she had gotten herself into now. Her tunic lay discarded on the desk, the contents of which were in disarray from both she and Raines having sat upon the desktop. Were one of the crew to walk in, surely there would be assumptions made - though with the storm raging on the way it was, having picked up in its ferocity, the likelihood of that was very low. Beside that point, Raleigh wasn’t sure she would mind if those assumptions were made… But that was neither here nor there at that moment.
”Told you - not all that interesting of a story,” she finished. Keeping her arm crossed over her chest she leaned forward to grab the rum from him again, waiting for his reaction to the information she had just shared with him.
