carnations (red) - love, pride, admiration carnations (orange) - happiness, warmth, determination

Ian was practically born with his. He’s had it for as long as he can remember, this bunch of wild red carnations blooming between his shoulder blades. “Pride,” Lip tells him, his finger on the page of a library book about flowers. “Sounds about right for an army nerd like you.” Ian punches him in the arm, but the definition makes him smile. Fiona never saw it like that growing up. She used to tell him they were all about love. “Love and happiness,” she’d say, tracing the pattern on his back through his t-shirt. “These ones around the edges? They’re more orange.” “Determination,” Lip counters. “Everything has more than one meaning. It’s why capitalism thrives under the consumers who buy into this crap, and why these marks are most effectively nothing more than a sham.” “Hush,” Fiona cuts him off, smacking him lightly on the head. “Leave him alone.” Ian grins at the two of them, freckle faced and innocent. He doesn’t really care what they mean. It was all good—he could live with any of it. All of it. “At least they match your hair,” Lip says, closing the book. Fiona giggles at that, and Ian shrugs. Blooming over his back and shoulders, the carnations grow with him. Red and orange and every variation in between. None of his other siblings have them. He’s the first Gallagher he knows with carnations imprinted on his skin.

dandelion - hope, perseverance, transformation

Dandelions that sprout on his knuckles. Too yellow and too bright and all wrong. Terry sees them for the first time, and he just laughs. “Couldn’t even be bothered to give you a real fucking flower. They gave you weeds on your goddamn hands.” He finds it amusing, for a little while. Like Mickey’s existence is one big joke. And honestly, at this point, he’s starting to think it might be. Because he hates the dandelions more than anything in the world, the way they sprinkle across his fingers, like a beacon in the worst fucking way. He looked it up once. Hope. Perseverance. What the fuck kind of mark was that? For a kid like him in a place like this—it’s one big cosmic fucking joke is what it is. So he takes a page out of his old man’s playbook and covers them up as soon as he possibly can. He’s thirteen, almost fourteen, and his cousin comes over with a tattoo gun he lifted from his ex-girlfriend’s dad. Mickey gets dark, bold letters stamped across his fingers, burying the dandelions beneath the ink.

carnations (red) - love, pride, admiration

It never even crossed his mind to share his new mark with Ian, but when he sees him on the other side of the bulletproof glass, eyes empty and the plastic phone pressed to his ear, it’s like he has to show him. Mickey unbuttons the top of his jumpsuit, a sad smile on his face. “Think you’re gonna like this one,” he says, pulling down the neck of his tank top. Ian’s mouth parts slightly when he sees the red carnations, three of them, opening up right over Mickey’s heart. For a second, Mickey feels the hope like lightning at his fingertips. Ian clears his throat. “What are those?” he asks, like he doesn’t know. “Hydrangeas?” “You know what they are.” Ian stares at him through the glass. His mouth opens and closes, but nothing comes out. It’s his last card to play. The red flowers that he first saw in the mirror of a holding cell. He thinks it might’ve been out on the sidewalk, when he told Ian he loved him that they finally bloomed, but he can’t be sure. And maybe it really is just a big cosmic joke, but Mickey can’t think of it like that, or he’ll never get out of here alive. So, he tells himself if he can’t have Ian in person, he’ll have to settle for the little bit of him he carries around with him. He wears Ian’s mark on his chest like a point of pride, and Ian does everything he can to forget about it.

lilac (purple) - first love

“The fuck is that?” Iggy asks, poking at Mickey’s arm. “What?” Mickey asks, twisting his arm. “That,” Iggy says, twisting it the other way so Mickey can see. On the inside of his upper arm are two purple flowers, their stems intertwined, and it takes everything in him not to react. “What are they?” Colin asks, smoking by the window. “Don’t know,” Mickey lies. The thing is—he knows exactly what they are. And that terrifies him. “That’s how I’ll know,” Mandy used to tell him. “When I meet the right guy, I know he’ll be the right guy because I’ll see it. I’ll get a flower mark.” Mickey shakes his head. “That shit’s as bad a reading your fucking horoscope in the paper.” “No it’s not,” she counters, annoyed. “I’ll get my lilacs one day. You’ll see.”

gladiolus - bravery

“Can’t believe you did that,” Ian marvels in the shower later, blood washing off them and running down the drain. “Mickey—you came out.” “Yeah,” is all Mickey says with shaky breath, because he kind of can’t believe it himself. ... “Holy shit,” Ian says, breathing hard. “Yeah,” Mickey says again, reaching back and grabbing Ian’s hip. “Yeah, come on.” “No, Mick,” Ian says, fingers brushing over the back of his neck. “Look.” It’s a ridiculous thing to say, because Mickey can’t physically look at the back of his own neck, but later, once they get off and dry off and they’re wrapped in warm towels in Mickey’s bedroom, Ian will show him the flower that blossoms at the place where his neck meets his shoulders. Ian takes a picture of it on his phone and Mickey stares at the gladiolus now stamped into his skin. They fall asleep that night wrapped up in each other with Ian’s lips pressed against the new mark on Mickey.