Your Tattoo And You

I am tattoo free, as I am an old.
However, my youngest sister has many, many tattoos, so I will share her story.
She has Winnie the Pooh on her hip, symbolizing the Tao of Pooh.
She has a star on one wrist and the number five on the other.
She has a giant tattoo of a Chinese mountain scene all over her back, which turns into a snake that wraps around her neck. The mountain scene is something that she adds to over the years. It's very cool.
She is, not surprisingly, the favorite aunt and the only cool aunt, for all the nieces and nephews.

Wait. Just yesterday you told me your tattoo was of a glass of bourbon.

I like tattoos on other people, but I am not someone who could pull off a tattoo and knowing this, any tattoo I attempted to get would look forced and I would feel the constant urge to cut it out with a dull butter knife.

Also, I may want to be buried in a Jewish cemetery if I am not shot out of a canon off a pirate ship into the North Atlantic.

In 1992 I wanted to get a tattoo of a barcode on my shoulder. It would have been the UPC code for 'beef tongue'. Isn't that clever and smart and hilarious? No, no it is not. I am so glad that my terror of needles kicked in and I left the tattoo shop and spent the $80 on records instead.

I have a tattoo. Of Janet Reno. It cost $475 back in 1994 and took–

Oh, forget it. Nobody would buy such shit.

Wait, wait, wait! You didn't tip your tattooist for that glory?

no tattoos, thanks to my combined fears of commitment and needles.

Please don't get me started on tattoo regret: http://langer.tumblr.com/post/51175769

http://tinyurl.com/y8mtuk7

Yes, there is a story.

http://www.parterre.com/cieca_profile.jpg

I have a friend who is a pretty talented and bad ass tattoo artist, and I think that being friends with him is probably my most legitimate claim to coolness. If being cool were more of a priority for me, I would let him give me a tattoo, but I know that I will never do it.

Because when I was 17, I got my belly button pierced, and when I was 21, my (expensive!) belly button ring fell out and after wandering all over my college campus looking for it in vain, I decided that instead of buying a new expensive ring or wearing a cheap mall kiosk one, it was probably time to just let the piercing close up. And there is still a small indentation above my navel and every time I see it or remember it I get furiously pissed off at this stupid ugly flaw, marring my lovely pale skin.

So whenever I think that maybe it would be cool to get a tattoo, I remember how much I hate that tiny little indentation above my belly button and figure I'd better not.

I spent probably a year sketching out a tattoo I wanted on my hip. It was a copy of a piece of jewelry I'd once seen. I could never get it right but figured the tattoo artist could. Then one day I sketched a little suggestion of a fish with long dramatic fins. The next day, my inappropriately aged boyfriend called me on my tattoo bluff and took me to a shop in Philly. Both sketches were on the same piece of paper. I said I wanted the jewelry design but the artist said that's going to take a day to sketch and the hip bone hurts a lot. I can do this little fish right now. So I said OK, do it. And I did, on my ankle. A year of thinking and sketching out the window. Nobody can tell what it is and half the time I want to scrub it off.

Sometimes I want to go apeshit and get a huge awesome tat on my arm or something. But then I see something like a wedding with a tatted bridesmaid and think that looks awful and tacky. So I don't.

I don't believe in anything strongly enough to tattoo it on my body.

We'd been hanging out all night at Van Hoose's drinking beer and doing whiskey shots while some middle-aged country band played half-assed covers. Her name was Tammy. Including us and the band, might have been eight people in the place. This was 1993 or so. I had been kicked out of college earlier in the fall and gone back to Kentucky for work, mostly because I didn't want to hang around Annapolis, going to college parties and explaining why I'd been kicked out of school. I found a job as a reporter at a local weekly newspaper called The Bourbon Times. I really liked telling my friends back at school I was a reporter for The Bourbon Times. I thought it sounded cool. Everyone has had bourbon. And everyone has had times. Put them together and that's where I worked. Anyway, so we're hanging out at Van Hoose's getting drunk and before long there's nothing left to do but head across the street to my apartment above the carpet store. I pretended to be interested in putting together some drinks. Tammy pretended to be interested in my books. "Damn, you sure do like to read," she said. Then we pretended to be interested in each other. "How long you lived in Paris?" I asked. "Twenty-four years," she said. "No, twenty-five," she quickly corrected herself. "I forgot. I turned twenty-five in June."

Tammy was way better than me in bed, more experienced, more confident. After I'd made a few clumsy efforts to control things she took over and just told me what to do. It was a relief. She directed me to take her from behind. That was when I realized she had a tattoo above her ass in a purplish script that read, simply, Henry, with a little swirl just below the name. Thank you, Van Hoose's, I thought. My first threesome. Here we are; just me, Tammy and Henry… doggystyle. Henry. Henry. Tammy was getting more energetic, more vocal. Maybe it's because she's not constantly being confronted by Henry, I thought, who for me was beginning to take on a more dominating presence; faceless, yet real, maybe even more real than me. After all, I didn't have any tattoos. Tammy had Henry. Henry. Henry. Henry. Henry. Goddamn, I thought, I'm really giving it to Henry. Henry. Henry. Tammy was talking dirty now. A lot of "Oh yeah's" and "Harders." Soon, I was talking too. "That's right, gimme that Henry." I knew, even as it was happening, as I was saying this thing, that it was wrong, that it would have repercussions, negative ones, but I couldn't stop. "Gimme that Henry, baby," I said, louder. "Gimme that Henry. Work that Hen- "

She was furious, but said nothing as she got dressed. "I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't – "

"Asshole," she said evenly, looking at the floor, with far less violence in her voice than the way she had been throwing her clothes on. She left without looking at me once or saying another word.

Seventeen years later and I still don't have any tattoos. I'm not opposed to them, I've just never felt strongly enough about anything to want to get it permanently inked on my body. When I think about Tammy, I realize that's probably the saddest thing in the world that anyone could say about themselves; that they've never felt anything deep enough to want to possess it forever, even in some small, insignificant way. And if I was really a man, I'd go out tonight and get a tattoo on my arm or chest or somewhere that read, simply, Tammy, with a littler swirl just below the name.

I had piercings done in each ear in the early nineties, when all the goyz did it. Frackers left scars. I might as well just park myself in gay prison because I will never get out of gay court innocent. So tattoos, no. An older friends with huge guns had a sitting dog done on his bicep. He quit working out and now that dog appears to be blowing itself. So that too.

I have many tattoos which might have been ill-advised, but that I don't really regret.

However, a friend of mine collects bad tattoos. For example, the "cock below the knee", and the ridiculous (and kind of gross) Aloha monkey.

But his absolute best is a portrait of Tatu from the Love Boat that takes up his entire thigh.

The only regret associated with the following tattoo is my regret that SaltTooth thought of getting it before I did. http://blogs.wnyc.org/eveningmusic/2008/12/10/nadia-the-tattooed-lady/