In the rainy Brooklyn, tattoo artist Estelle Irene's small shop looks like an ink-colored stone embedded in a street corner. Her eyes were covered by black hair, and she was as thin as a young boy. Her green pupils were filled with ice that could not be melted. The cigarette butts burned into ashes between her fingers, but they could not burn away the loneliness and indifference in her bones. Everyone who comes here says that her needles can carve the most secret thoughts, but no one knows that those totems entwined with thorns and the dark patterns that look like shields are the passwords she has hidden for seventy years.
Until the man in a dark blue jacket pushed open the glass door. Steve Rogers, with the smell of the smoke of World War II and the lingering gentleness, asked for an unknown rune to be tattooed on his left chest. When the line cut the skin, it not only oozed blood, but also awakened the old wound under the eagle-shaped mark on the back of Estelle's neck.
She is a foreigner who forged an identity, and is the missing experimental subject "Thorn" in the archives. The cigarette at her fingertips cannot burn away the imprint of the past; he is a hero who stepped out of history, a shield carrying the weight of the times, but in her cold eyes, he glimpsed a loneliness similar to his own. When the shadow of New York spreads again and the lines under the tattoo needle begin to heat up, those names that have been deliberately forgotten and the truth bound by thorns will eventually surface with the ink.
She thought she had developed a heart of stone through seventy years of loneliness, but she never expected that the man who always smelled like old-fashioned aftershave would use his temperature to melt the ice on her cigarette butt little by little. And he never thought that this tattoo artist who was stingy with his eyes would be the last key to unlock the mystery of the past - when the shield met the needle, when the warmth hit the ice, their story hidden in the lines and scars had just begun.
Intention: Those scars used as weapons will eventually bloom against the darkness in someone's palm.