Tattoos

Every time I go to a certain coffee shop, I order my Americano from a barista with a delicate little treble clef tattooed on his big neck. I like the treble clef – it’s a curvy and sinuous, feminine symbol. I want that tattoo.

My sister thinks I’d regret a tattoo when I’m old and fat. But I think I’ll probably stay 110 pounds and never get flabby forever, and never have kids who would use my small, subtle tattoo to justify their big and obnoxious tattoos.

I want a tattoo when the task of writing stories that seem to satisfy no one – least of all the people who pay to read them – wears me into a thin and two-dimensional, flat version of myself. I think I’d take a quiet satisfaction knowing that my morally upright readers have no idea they are getting the news from a girl who has etched an extremely edgy deaths-head eighth note (or perhaps a suicidal teddy bear) into her hip.

But I hear it’s unwise to get permanent body art when you’re blind-drunk on job woes. So I console myself with a new belly-button ring and find when I put it in that it still seems too big and blingy. Then I remember that I pierced my bellybutton in a similar state of passive-aggressive rebellion and decide to handle my issues in a less drastic way — like a cathartic post on this blog, which at least I sometimes like — and get a tattoo on my flaccid neck some day when I’m rebelling against something else — being old and fat and retired.

~ by stultiloquence on May 14, 2008.