Title: Skin Deep
Fandom: Inception
Pairing: Arthur/Eames
Categories: AU, drama, hurt/comfort, pre-canon
Length: Long (16,613 words)
Warnings: author rated as Mature, though there's a sex scene that may warrant an Explicit/NC-17 rating, references to (canon) suicide, brief violence

Author on LJ: starlingthefool
Website: Starlingthefool / The Index of Doom

Summary:
A story that starts with a spiral (Fibonacci), ends with a fire (arson), and is stained with ink and blood (tattoos) in the middle.
(In other words, a tattoo shop AU that totally took on a mind of its own.)

Review:
This is one of my favorite Inception fics! It's such an enjoyable, intelligent story, starting out completely AU with Eames as a tattoo artist in San Francisco, Ariadne as his apprentice, and Arthur as his occasional client. I love the tattoos Arthur gets and the conversations they have about them. The story unfolds like origami, adding layers of complexity and characterization, with threads of hurt/comfort and hot sex, a bit of organized crime violence, and a happy ending. As the story goes along, it dove-tails beautifully into canon compliance; I can totally imagine this as the characters back-stories.

Skin Deep
Originally posted in inception_kink here
Also available as a podfic read by anatsuno.