Not Getting a Tattoo
Not getting a tattoo is a difficult decision that presses most strongly upon us during our college years (or prison years, or military years, depending upon our path in life), and then gets easier to not make as the subsequent years flow by.
Pain doesn't even come into it. Pain in the service of art is a privilege. Pain in the service of art you get to wear, doubly so. The challenging part is all aesthetic.
Other people's mistakes serve as cautionary examples. More frightening than the full-body tattoo regretted in retrospect ("Sorry Roger! You tiger now!") is the laughably meek tattoo that screams: "I'm a fascinating individual... but not too different from anybody else!"
An old girlfriend got a small Celtic knot tattoo on her upper shoulder region, and my stomach lurched when I found out. If you hail from the moneyed upper middle class, is there anything less biker than that? Anything less extreme, less personally expressive? It makes getting the Chinese character for "strength" tattooed on your bicep seem like out-and-out death metal by comparison.
Laser removal notwithstanding, that's the really scary thing about getting tattooed. What if your choice turns out to be gut-wrenchingly dull? Too far in the other direction, and at least the gossip is tinged with an undertone of head-shaking admiration. Like the guy from Jackass who has a giant tattoo of himself giving a double thumbs up on his back. Probably going too far, from a conventional perspective. But, still — nice. It's something people can chat about.
Here are some tattoos I've considered but never settled on actually getting:
— The word "occasionally," which I have always been unable to spell without assistance;
— A list of weight and measurement conversions, safe cooking temperatures for various kinds of meats, state capitals and other handy facts;
— My Gmail chat status indicator column (with friends and family depicted online with emblematic status messages);
— The paradoxical words "Tattoo-free since 1975" (alternate version: "This skin left intentionally blank");
— A skull with a knife and fork behind it just like Alton Brown got in Minneapolis in the last episode of the second season of Feasting on Asphalt.
The fact that this list is 80 percent word tattoos, and not, you know, images, is another reason that caution may not be a bad watchword when it comes to getting inked. Images are tough to get right. The whole point of tattooing is the power of the image as metaphor. There are entire fascinating books about the language of Russian prison tattoos; a barbed wire star around a hammer and sickle means: "I began stealing out of poverty and hunger in this Soviet life." An old-fashioned balancing scale hanging on a cross impaled through a skull marks the prisoner as an "orthodox" — a thief who has never transgressed the laws of the convicts and acts as a "judge" (or mediator) between other prisoners. And a cheerful goat, which you most certainly don't want and was forcibly applied, means you're an unprotected outcast from the complicated prison hierarchy.
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There's another reason not to get a tattoo: Judaism. God put a mark on Cain, the murderer, and that mark kept him ever outside the halls of God-fearing folk from that day forward. Get a tattoo, and, in theory, you even get hassled after death, at least in terms of getting your funeral officiated.
This, of course, may be less important to folks without the Old part of the Good Book running around in their heads, hearts or veins, but there's a chilling sort of emotional logic kicking around that old prohibition.
Wrath of God. "Sorry Roger, you tiger now!" Looking like a chump. Probably best to put it off for another 30 years.
— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)
— graphic by Derek Evernden (derek@ocellus.net)
