Tattoo YOU

This is called a gun for a fucking reason. 

Fucking needles are not my friend. How can something so elegant, so shiny, so small cause so much distress? And why, why, why would I agree to being repeatedly stabbed with one after the traumatic episode that should’ve taught me a lesson thirty-five years ago? Evidently, people do crazy, crazy things for love. Exhibit A: In sixth grade, after I’d triumphantly badgered my mother into submission, I got the green light for ear piercing. No other girl in the contiguous states still had virgin earlobes. Surely.

I desperately wanted off the loser side of the playground, so one summer evening I plopped down on a rigid cane back chair at my grandmother’s kitchen table and prepared to be punctured. By a brain surgeon. My Uncle Mack spent a total of twenty-four years in school to earn that distinction, and he was handy with a scalpel. I figured, shit, how much damage could he do with a needle? I vaguely remembered my mother’s shrieks of pain when her brother had pierced her ears with a syringe in our dining room a couple of years before; but it was because he’d sterilized the thing with a cigarette lighter, and it hadn’t cooled before he’d stabbed her. Still, a girl wants what a girl wants, and I convinced myself that this incising would be different. Boy howdy.

First, I barely made it through the “deadening of the lobes” with ice cubes. The left one hurt so fiercely that I refused to freeze the right one. Magnificent error. Turns out that Uncle Mack had only found an embroidery needle, and he had zero tolerance for whiners. He was used to sawing through people’s skulls, so he just jammed that pencil-sized needle right into my flesh. The agony was so fucking intense that all my sweat glands flung open, and the ensuing deluge flooded a three-mile radius; I hallucinated neon colors pulsing to the Fifth Dimension’s Aquarius, (feat. Tiny Tim); and I’m sure I blacked out and woke up addicted to crack in an alley a week later. Okay. Maybe I’m remembering that wrong. But, even the reality of those tiny surgical steel studs nestled in my swollen, violated earlobes did nothing to convince me to go near another sharp piece of metal ever, ever again.

So, what in the name of all things freaking holy was I doing in a tattoo shop last July? I am Episcopalian, for heaven’s sake. Lapsed, but still. Conservatives do not usually sport tattoos, but lately I have noticed an uptick in the number of folks who boldly display body art. Angelina Jolie seems to have ushered in a new era with her runes and tigers and Arabic. Oh, my. The Totally Stylin’ Tattoos Barbie got a lot of press because it comes with its own tattoo “gun” for your little ones to ink themselves. Even Germany’s first lady, Bettina Wulff, has tats. They must be cool. But the hip factor is not why I decided to endure being jabbed yet again. I did it for good, old-fashioned love.

Yes, yes. I have been married. And married. And married. Let’s not dwell. Still, I was shocked and awed to find myself entering into a new kind of relationship a few years ago. I felt—and still feel—giddy, protected, hopeful. I realized that a woman over 40 does not have to be in a Meryl Streep movie to find true love. At least once a day I gawk with naked adoration at this lovely man who has taken me just like I am. And I am no fucking picnic.

First, I’m deaf. That’s got to be crazy-making for any partner of mine. And, I wiggggg out when things go wrong, so I cop to being a LOT nutty. Plus, my complete package includes—God bless their precious, little hearts—an autistic, bipolar twenty-year-old and a surly high school senior who’s ninety-eight-point-three-percent out of the closet. Who would take this on? The man is special and deserves to be permanently honored on my flesh. So. Back to the needle.

As a 17^th birthday gift, I relented to my own daughter’s ceaseless badgering and agreed to let her have a rainbow sprinkle of stars painted on her hip. Kind of naughty in its hidden-ness, but it won’t lose her any job opportunities. I trucked her a couple of hours over from Georgia to Alabama, a state which allows the marking of under-aged skin as long as a parent is present. But I didn’t tell anyone that I planned to succumb to the needle myself. I envisioned a tiny version of my sweetheart’s signature in orange with a fuchsia heart. Tiny. On the inside of my second toe, where the thong of my flip-flops usually resides.

The tattoo place was really rather nice, the décor funky and clever; the bathroom offered reclaimed car parts as fixtures. The young woman who greeted us was gift-wrapped in reptiles and flowers and quotations. Most of her body piercings looked angry and painful. She listened intently to my daughter’s design desires, and then worked and reworked a computer image until she was satisfied with the aesthetic. She printed several sizes and pressed them against my daughter’s alabaster hip, and they finally agreed on the perfect fit.

I flipped through a local writer’s literary magazine and made myself at home on the cushy leather couch as the artist led my daughter through a black curtain down the hall. Three quarters of an hour later, my sweetie reappeared, flushed, drenched with perspiration, exhausted. She reported that the procedure hurt so much that she almost begged out, but she didn’t want half a rainbow. This, of course, put me immediately at ease. Still, I remembered that my daughter always overreacted to even the hint of pain. And my tattoo was much, much smaller. I figured, shit, how much damage could this girl do with a needle? I apparently have a crappyass memory.

I’d explained earlier to the young woman what I wished for in body art, and she’d examined my toe, which I’d awkwardly held up to the counter. So now I slid a folded piece of paper across the counter to her, and she scanned it, made a few adjustments, hit the print button and started the death march down the hall. I shuffled along behind her like I had soiled myself.

She helped me get situated on what looked like a kinky spa table, and then held a couple of rough drafts to the side of my toe. While she made a transferrable copy of the selected size, I lay back on the table and feigned nonchalance. The Garfield poster on the ceiling caused me think of a dentist who jammed long needles into the roof of my mouth once, so I felt just fricking awesome. The artist rubbed the transfer on my skin, and I looked over a collection of ink pots to choose my colors. She picked up a long, black instrument with a silver end and dipped it into the tangerine to fill some sort of chamber. I clenched everything I had in anticipation of pain and pulled an anus muscle I didn’t even know existed.

When she started the first letter, a surprising calmness settled through me. The needle actually felt good, sort of like a mini massage. I completely relaxed through the second letter and the third. And then she swooped up into the final character. Maybe all the nerves in that toe are bundled in that very spot because my right eye almost popped out, and I had to look with my squinty left eye to make sure she hadn’t just sliced off my fucking toe with a hot, jagged blade. I held absolutely still and forgot all about the direct bearing of breathing on my well-being. I vaguely remember the rinsing of the needle and chamber and the refilling of the fuchsia. I had requested a filled-in heart, but the branding of the outline nearly made my children motherless. “Oh,” I wheezed, “That really looks good just like that.”

“So, you don’t want it filled in?” she inquired, still holding the needle gun against my toe.

“No, no.” I never realized I could speak so quietly. “Looks great. More whimsical. Thanks. You heartless, ball-breaking bitch.” Okay. Maybe I didn't say that last part. It's the thought that counts.

The artist rubbed a dab of ointment on my tattoo and wrapped the wound with apparently a couple thousand motherfucking fire ants in soft white gauze. Then, I actually paid good money for the maiming and hobbled to the car. I glanced over at my daughter, lanky and beautiful on the reclining passenger seat. In her own tattoo-hell, she fussed and whined all the way home like I forgot to change her diaper. I thought about how precious she was as a toddler and how I longed for her tiny hand to be in mine again. Just long enough for me to break all her fucking fingers for suggesting this shit in the first place.