Tattoo You

I've got this whole entry to write on my trip last weekend to the San Diego Zoo and the fight between Pants and I that almost kept it from happening, and then ended up causing the weekend to be so much better and brighter, like how water droplets in the air will catch light and make a rainbow where there would otherwise have just been light, but something far more urgent has come up.

My little brother is thinking seriously about getting a tattoo.

I have much to say about tattoos, having lived in a virtual swarm of them since I was sixteen years old. Our generation is an inky one, to be sure. While the Baby Boomers will be breaking in (or breaking) the Social Security system and forging new pathways in elder care, my generation will blazing the trail of how to explain Grandma's ass crack tattoo or Granddad's heinously stretched earlobes, or what the hell prompted all of us to start confessing things over the internet.

From my own experience in the tattooed jungle, I offer these brief artifacts:

* The beautiful, sad-eyed, and probably slow-witted girl at my boarding school whose tanned little ankle bore a three-and-a-half inch horizontal tribal design. Hours of sophomore study hall were devoted to speculation about how Lindsay, at 15, had managed to get herself tattooed before she showed up among us, slouched behind a curtain of light brown hair, giggling dreamily at our impossibly handsome, hungover English teacher as he scrubbed his eyes and moaned for a full five minutes before starting class. When asked to respond to our reading of Beowulf, she answered, "it's so, like, violent, or something." Oh, the glamor!

* Tall Wendy in high school with her Grateful Dead bears, dancing along beneath the waistline of her faded jeans. I met a girl in college, Terah, with the exact same tattoo. I thought I was happy and free in those years, but now, looking back, I remember how much of them were spent waiting around waiting for the high to wear off, or for someone to change the channel, or for that god damned Pink Floyd song to end. Wendy, Terah, how do you like those bears now?

* My first college boyfriend, the only unquestionably evil person I've ever met, was an aspiring tattoo artist whose tattoo gun was purchased for $500 over the internet. He immediately commenced scribbling on his friends, a tight-knit group of squatters, scammers, and addicts, who offered up their skin for permanent branding. I can draw beautifully-- it's one of the only things I will claim immediately and without reservation-- so I was often drafted to design these tattoos, which went onto transfer paper and then directly into someone's hide. My art is out there. A gay man has an armband of monkeys copulating; a young woman has etched into her calf a (tragically simple) square maze leading from a palm tree at one end to her heart at the other; another young woman has a vertical representation of all the stages of the moon down her spine, but she was lying on her side on a couch while the tattoo was being down, having dosed herself liberally with Valium, and the resulting tattoo veers sharply left as it approaches her lower back. When she stood up at the end, no one told her. And a guitar player who called himself Mikey Fiction has the Devil's face (ironically, my ex's best work) on the inside of his left forearm, so people would see Satan when he was playing his guitar. Night after night, my evil boyfriend (I recognized him as a terrible person even then), would trace designs on my back while I slept, and he pestered me often about when I would let him put one on me. I told him I couldn't decide what I wanted, but I knew that I never wanted any mark of his on me.

* Another ex-boyfriend, the poor guy who got stuck cleaning up the toxic oil spill left from the tattoo artist, once made a joke about pterodactyls that made me fall off a chair crying with laughter. I can't remember the joke, but nearly a year after we broke up, he decided to get a pterodactyl tattooed across the width of his shoulders. I went with him. I remembered thinking the artist could have done a better job, made the thing look a little more dignified and exotic, and less cartoony.

* I've heard tell that a former friend of mine tattooed the name of her transgender lover across her pubic bone (of all places) scant weeks before they broke up and never spoke again. A name? There?

Looking back at this entry, it seems that most of my tattoo stories are not happy ones, and this worries me because the urge to find a design and commit it to flesh is still very strong with me. I've had a few ideas over the years-- the Golden Gate Bridge across my lower back as a symbol of crossing over and the changes I made in how I thought about life when I went to a particularly powerful seminar in San Francisco. But then I read an article about how the Golden Gate is the most popular suicide bridge in the nation, how it's like this irresistibly symbolic magnet for the utterly hopeless, and how people have been trying for years to make the bridge suicide-proof while still maintaining its character and beauty. I'd hate to think that right after I got something inked into me, its meaning would change completely for me. For a person who holds grudges against particular shirts for the shitty things that have happened to me while I was wearing them, this seems a very real danger.

My current idea, one I've been kicking around for at least three years, is a small black ink drawing, its lines characteristic of the old woodcuts printers used to put in the beginnings of books, or as chapter leads. It would be a girl in some kind of traveling attire, maybe a cloak, maybe boots, who's on the move, hiking upwards. Her face would be three-quarters turned away, looking off to the horizon, and she might be holding a walking stick of some sort, and possibly a book. I can't decide if the book is in her hand open, or just tucked under her arm, but it's meant to be some kind of map-- something that in equal parts guides her and acts as a record of her experiences. She might have a small pack. The image is meant to convey an explorer and the act of seeking, but also independence and contentment. Its style is meant to recall old books, and great stories, and epic journeys.

The thing is, I don't know where I'd put it. Butt tattoos are supposed to hurt the least, and I like the idea of a tattoo's visibility being voluntary, something people have to earn, but putting such a symbolic and important image on my butt seems to negate the whole idea. Plus, it might look like the explorer is making the epic journey up the slope of my butt, and that the trip is so arduous she might not make it. Anywhere else though... I know Angelina Jolie can manage to pull off the evening dress-with-tats look, but I haven't seen anyone else do it successfully...

Nuances, decisions-- this is why I'm still unmarked.