"If you were to win a bet and you could force someone to get a silly tattoo, what would it be?"
"Uhhh...well," I said, but before I really started thinking, he said, "Nothing dirty. Silly."
"Uhhh...well," I said, and he jumped in. "Do you want to hear what mine is?"
This is not an unusual situation for us. I do the same thing; I act like I want to pose a hypothetical situation, but I actually have an answer of my own I want to share. It's weird, though, to say apropos to nothing as we're making dinner, "Hey, if there was suddenly a rip in the space-time continuum and I could only drink one beverage for the rest of my life, it would definitely be Ovaltine."
So of course I wanted to hear what Dan's answer would be.
"Richie Cunningham from Happy Days."
I busted out laughing. "What??"
"Like a photo-realistic portrait." A few taps on his cell phone later, and he turned it towards me to reveal this:
(image credit: What ever happened to...)
"You know, like this."
I mean, he could have dropped the mike right there and walked out of the room. How could I come up with something better than that? Answer: I didn't. But what I do have that's better than him are tattoos (perhaps this is only because I have tattoos and he doesn't, but who's keeping track).
It wasn't always so, though. I used to have one really bad tattoo.
I got it when I was 18, but not during a night of drunken hilarity my freshman year at spring break in Cabo. No, I got a tattoo with my brother and my mom. Not the same tattoo, but we all got 'em together, and that's the only non-seedy part of the story. We went over to this guy's house and into his basement, where he had a space cleared with a chair and a mirror and his tattoo machine. Now, it's not like this was a cool, finished basement with carpeting and a wet bar. No. This was a basement-basement, with cinder block walls and a concrete floor. But we sat, one by one, and got our tattoos.
Mine? It came from a greeting card: the Chinese symbol for "peace." These were trendy tattoos to get at the time, these symbols, and I can't even say for sure that this is what the symbol means. It feels pretty legit, though, because it was on a card, and card's don't lie, right? Ink that baby on!
Nearly 20 years later, I'm feeling like this is a terrible tattoo because it is a terrible tattoo. It's fading, and as it's the only thing I have on my back, it looks like a mistake. I wanted to get it removed altogether, but my brother forbade it. "You have to keep it in some way. It's like your prison tattoo. You can't erase it." This allusion to prison was not comforting, but I understood what he meant: he had a bad tattoo from that visit, too (Bruce Lee's ubiquitous dragon), and so did my mom (but hers is actually good--a pelican), so they bound us together. The tattoo, to me, was silly, but the meaning was serious.
I couldn't just leave it, though. My brother had gotten many more cool tattoos since that first one, and I'd gotten another, too, but it was small. Being a tattooed person felt good to me, like I was in a special club of badass women, but I still didn't like the tattoo. If I wasn't going to erase it, I had no other choice: I had to add to it.
I'll spare the details of getting the piece. An artist who'd done work on my brother put it on me, a curvy woman with Nordic roots who made me feel welcome and not only humored my idea about what to do with it, she brought it to life:
Yes, it hurt, and yes, the symbol is still there, but it's a part of a whole now. The white pine, the owl, the pine cone, and yes, the "Peace": all are symbols now, hidden away from others' eyes on my back but never far away.
This is a serious tattoo, serious because it's a no-messing-around, big tattoo, and serious because it speaks my ability to commit. There are symbols in the images, but there's larger symbolism in tattooing. Those who have tattoos understand what it means to say yes to art, to trust those who will create this art, and to live with the reminder of their commitments the remainder of their days. Even if that tattoo is Richie Cunningham.
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