TAT2 TV

None of this means anything. Despite what TV wants you to think, tattoos mean nothing. Don’t get yourself worked up about the significance of a tattoo. It’s a drawing on your skin. Who cares what it means. Use your skin like a beat up car so when you end up dead it looks like you lived. Don’t park it in the garage every night and wax it every Sunday in your pristine front yard. Mark it, scuff it, fuck it up. That way you know that you did something right. This is a hard notion to grasp when you decide to get tattooed for the first time.

I spent a year debating getting tattooed. Fearful for my future. Fearful for what a tattoo would do to my life. The suspense was unbearable as I decided that the first one was going to actually happen. It was going to transform from a piece of paper hung next to my bed to real blood and ink and skin and future failure (inevitably). So I paid the deposit. Then hyper-ventilated.

Then came the Nightmares. Every type of failure. Misspelled words. Horribly placed tattoo stencils. Crippling pain causing half finished work for eternity. Inevitable unemployment (thanks to said tattoo). I was a wreck. I was a wreck because I thought I should be. I thought I was changing my life for good. And for the worse.

It’s hard to say why the tattoo hurt. In retrospect, less because of the physical pain, and more as a result of the adrenalin that could not be contained. Think New Orleans flooding mixed with the earthquake of ’89. I couldn’t see straight. But it wasn’t the kind of adrenalin that PCP gives. I was destructible. This adrenalin made me want to vomit. Unfortunately (for me, fortunately for the shop) I couldn’t. Then, somehow, it was done.

That was it. Count me out, I was done for.

Time may have passed between my first and second, and then my second and third. But the itch was there. I couldn’t scratch it. Incessant buzzing in my ear that wouldn’t go away. I realized what little tattoos mattered. I realized that if it feels good, you should do it. No one cares about the story behind you getting out of a shitty relationship and tattooing a humming bird on your hip to mean that you are finally free. The intrinsic value of a tattoo should matter to one person. Don't expect the world to care about your deeply emotional meanings. Maybe you would be better suited with these than a real tattoo if that's the case: