5. Tattoo
Do it for the blog.
When I was around 14 or 15, a couple of my friends spent a night smoking terrible weed and giving each other stick and poke tattoos with a needle and ball point pen ink. I was not present at this event, so I can’t say what it was like, but I was very shocked to see the results. A smiley face and the word ‘hello’ on ankles. Both of these kids would probably have been perceived as pretty straight-laced to the casual observer or any teachers around, so I was baffled by their decision making. I had other friends who were much more likely candidates for giving themselves a potential bacterial infection in such a bizarrely thoughtless way.
Since that day, I’ve realized that there are lots of people who just don’t give a shit and you can’t really guess who they are until you see them in a tank top. They’ll get permanent marks on their body whenever, wherever, and mostly find the whole thing funny. It starts young.
Then there are some people who have lots of tattoos with no cohesive aesthetic vision, but they do not find it funny at all. They are extremely earnest.
“This one is so special,” they’ll say, pointing at a squiggly line that might spell out the number seven or something. During these tattoo tours, I’ve always just nodded politely or, if I’ve been drinking, say, “Oh my god, yes, it’s so you. It is YOU.”
And finally there are people who get tattoos which are significant markers of identity, culturally and historically. They easily transcend the limitations of my snarky little blog and the generalizations therein.
Though, honestly, even the silliest reasons for getting tattoos are fine. It’s just not something I’ve done, so it has been hard to picture what emotional state would finally make me do it.
The main reason I’ve held off on getting one is because I take everything about myself way too seriously. The second reason is that I am always trying to burst out of the ashes of the old into the new, exactly like Ben Affleck’s phoenix. I move from place to place constantly, leaving behind my belongings. I burn old pictures, I throw out sheets I’ve slept in with past lovers (or donate them). My brain wants to hold onto bad memories so badly that if I don’t eradicate all reminders I’ll never know peace from them running like a permanent slideshow of all my worst hits. A tattoo with deep significance one day may be something I want to cut off my body the next, just so I can stop thinking about whatever it was I was trying to immortalize.
That’s why I got my first tattoo on my back, someplace I’ll never see it unless I’m trying to. Actually, no one has seen it except for the woman who gave it to me. I’d been looking for somebody who would tattoo me for less than a hundred dollars, and I found her on 103rd street on the top floor of artist’s collective with no elevator. The studio was set in a corner, with windows in two walls streaming in silver light. It was rainy outside. I was damp and huffing and puffing from the climb. It all happened so fast: I showed her a drawing I’d made in my notebook, thinking she’d take it and make it gorgeous. She snapped a pic of it with an iPad and printed it out pretty much as it was, then directed me to lay down on my stomach.
She was not careless. She is just one of the people for whom getting a tattoo is no big deal at all and so there was zero ceremony involved.
In the past, when I thought about what I would get, I wanted a tattoo of my childhood cat. I loved this cat so much, but she barely had a name. She was long-haired and grey with a white chest and paws. I called her Snowball at first, but then we just called her Kitten or Grey Grey. She died when I was in college, in an awful way. She always slept in the crook of my right arm, and I want to keep her there permanently. But, I thought that first I should really tone my arms. Yes, I should have really jacked arms that would look good with a tattoo.
So I waited. As you’re growing up, there is some idea of being ‘finished,’ of being the very best version of yourself and then you remain there in stasis until death or some other easily defined moment of transformation. Perhaps around retirement age. You become a perfect statue carved from marble, more itself with each honing chip of the divine creator. Eventually you recognize that you are not a statue, you’re a banana—as soon as you’re ready to eat, you’re already getting too soft.
I imagined my body at some state of readiness or completion where it would be the right moment to adorn myself. Now I’ve lived in my body in all sorts of states. Different aesthetic states, but also sickness, injury, healing, strength, weakness, exhaustion, desire. It will never be finished, when you think about it. In death, it will continue to change, breaking down, collapsing, entering the bodies of other micro organisms, who are in turn ingested, until it eventually works its way back up the food chain to be consumed by another human body that then also transforms. This is only if I’m allowed to openly decompose on a hill somewhere, which is what I want. Now, amidst my leavings, there will be a few grains of Prussian blue ink falling from my crumbling back pores.
The tattooing process was not that painful. It was the annoying kind of pain, tolerable. I think I was imagining a sharp nerve pain; it was more like being scraped in slow motion. As I laid there with my head on my arms, I looked around at all the drawings on the wall. My tattoo artist had a very specific style that was quite beautiful. Cartoonish skulls, cattle heads, snakes battling eagles, busty women in hearts of fire. This was her art, but she was willing to make a quick buck on my ‘design’ if it could be called that. All I wanted was a squiggly line of my own, something I would one day reverently show to people only to watch them struggle to find something nice to say about it.
So, what’s my tattoo? It’s a blue spiral. It looks a lot like the emoji, unfortunately. A spiral represents water. Rebirth. The cyclical nature of things. Coming back to the same place again and again, but always moving outwards and upwards.
I know no one cares about my tattoo and few people will like it when they see it. I love it. Yet, it was a huge act of will to sit through the process and I’m now glad she rushed me. As soon as I felt the needle, sick dread filled my stomach. It was permanent. A permanent decision. It began and I was convinced I’d made a mistake before she was finished. And after, for a little while. The weeks I spent tenderly caring for it is what made me love it, which works for a lot of things. And it helps to remember that nothing is permanent. Not really. A tattoo, a beloved cat, memories. Nothing at all.
My tattoo artist, who is well-worth a follow.
My tattoo was a shape I’d been thinking about a lot, but in Greece I saw so much Cycladic art that uses the spiral over and over it was a message from the universe. I really recommend this era of ancient art overall if you want to dive into a section of the Met no one goes to:
In Athens, there was also this statue of a centaur with a penis in front, which I want more people to see.
And I genuinely love to hear people’s tattoo stories. I asked a lot of people about their experiences while getting up the nerve to finally do it, and appreciate them much more now. Please do share! In the comments or text :) 🌀
The “zero ceremony” part was very relatable to me. I wanted a tattoo of the guided by voices lyric “i am an incurable and nothing else behaves like me” at 17, but being a dork, I waited a year to think about it (and in theory, do it legally).
I ended up waiting til 22 and I was determined to make it very special and important, looking at thousands of fonts and trying to get the tattoo artist on board with how “insane” it was that both our dads were from the same small town in Iowa (he did not raise an eyebrow but he did knock down the price).
I love the tattoo and it’s the one I most pondered, but my subsequent ones have been whims at times and “vital” at other times. I like the balance of intention and peace in the idea that the ink is only as permanent as our minds make it considering our future coffins and cell decay. Sometimes I really know the meaning beforehand, sometimes it’s a subconscious post-tattoo realization.
I love this! I have no tattoos but always wanted one. Felt like this was a very interesting and meaningful tattoo experience. Xox