The Tattoo of Life
We are all a product of what life has dealt us over the years. Some people wear it on their face with their wrinkles showing the hardships they have endured. Other people show the wear and tear on their souls where it is not as obvious at first, but comes through equally clearly after time spent with them. I think we all know people that have become embittered with age. They generally feel that they have not gotten their due or that life has somehow treated them unfairly. We also probably all know people who are happy-go-lucky and seem to be unaffected by life’s travails and always have a smile on their face. I’ll bet we mostly think those people are not always the brightest bulbs and can be happy because they either think so little or care so little about what goes on around them. Neither extreme is ever as easily explained as I have said, but there are probably elements of truth in those observations. The world will always have happy people and grumpy people. Hell, even two of the seven dwarves were relegated to those extremes by some medieval fairytale writer.
If we ignore the extremes for a moment we are left with 95.44% of the population. In the statistics of normal distributions, that is the two standard deviation amount that represents the bulk of the population. I have no evidence that those are the exact lines of the happy/grumpy definitions, but it more or less makes sense to me that it would be approximately the case. For those of us who fall into this large bulge in the normal distribution curve, we are more or less happy or grumpy to varying degrees, but not overwhelmed by either feeling. We are folks that stumble along and do the best we can to avoid being grumpy and to seek as much happiness as we can.
I like to think of life like a tattoo parlor that puts various marks and messages on us over the course of our life. I tend to think that tattoos get put on bodies due either to the extreme emotions of happiness or bitterness. These are mostly indelible marks and images but occasionally with lots of work and some pain (usually called therapy or analysis) we can erase those from our being. Most of us wear the badges of our experience proudly, and yet there are always some who prefer to hide their lives from outside view. Perhaps they are ashamed or perhaps they are just intensely private. There is a difference between someone who sports a tattoo in a place where it can be seen when wearing a short-sleeved shirt and someone who has one on their neck crawling out of their collar and into the consciousness of anyone who speaks to them. Some tattoos are cute or incidental and others are bold and make strong statements. Tattoos say a lot about a person and their state of mind.
I have one tattoo that I acquired at age 46 and it is the logo of my motorcycle club. I turned forty-six at a time when I got the biggest financial payday of my life by virtue of the payout from a twenty-three year career of hard work with Bankers Trust. It is fair to say that I was riding high and focused on the fun things in my life. The tattoo is on my upper left arm and I often say that I knew by 46 that motorcycling would always be a big part of my life, so I am happy with the ink. I stand by that sentiment now that I am twenty years older. I view my tattoo as a message to myself that I had achieved the success I had desperately sought in life (less by monetary and more by achievement standards). It was a celebration of life by me.
My oldest son has four tattoos that I know of. All were acquired between the ages of 19 and 22 and they represent various things that meant something to him at the time and expressed sentiments in writing that were words from songs he liked. If I were guessing, I would suggest that two of them were done out of happiness and two of them were done out of some degree of bitterness. As with all things in life, they probably related to some combination of love life and achievement aspirations. I have no way of knowing what he thinks of them now, but I’ll bet he has no regrets about them (at least I hope so and from what I know of my son I believe so) even though he hasn’t gotten a new tattoo in perhaps fifteen years. In his case, as a multiple tattoo person living in a world where armfuls of tattoos are not at all unusual, I wonder most about why he has stopped getting tattoos. It could be as simple as the realities of economics. Tattoos cost money and I think he has learned that it grows less on trees than it seemed to 15-20 years ago. I also suspect that he feels that making statements on his body does less to make dreams come true than he probably used to think. I fear that his absence from the tattoo parlor is a sign that the realities of life are more in his mind than not. That is both good and bad simultaneously.
My daughter never got any tattoos that I know of, but my youngest son recently got one at age twenty-three. He had graduated from Cornell and was sorting out what he wanted to do in his work life as he worked as a personal assistant to a big-time comedian. A parent cannot help but wonder whether a child is thinking things like tattoos through sufficiently when they act. I don’t think my oldest son was rash in his decisions (those tattoos were not a result of a drunken night out), but I know for a fact that my youngest son spent a long time thinking through what he wanted to do with his one tattoo. He may have even over-thought his tattoo, because he sent it out to a graphic designer to have it drawn exactly to his specifications, which he gave to the tattoo artist.
My youngest granddaughter (she was three) was shown my son’s finished tattoo. She lives in Brooklyn, so her life involves interacting with lots of hipsters and lots of tattoos. My son’s tattoo depicts a wooded road running up his inner forearm, which heads up to mountains that are covered by a starlit sky. It is a fairly complex tattoo that obviously means a great deal to my son. I thought my granddaughter’s comment was priceless when she said in the words of an innocent, “that has a lot going on there for a tattoo”. We enjoy kidding him by repeating her words whenever we look at his forearm.
I’m a big fan of tattoos. I know some people (my wife included) do not like the idea of defacing their body with sentiments that may or may not last their lifetime. I am fully aware that in some religions, like Judaism, tattoos are taboo. Jewish law quotes Leviticus who says, “You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves: I am the LORD.” This is a pretty strongly-worded warning of prohibition against the defacing of the body for some craven image. It is said that many Jewish cemeteries will not admit a body that has been tattooed (the exception made is for Holocaust survivors with concentration camp tattoos).
Despite all that, tattoos have become much more mainstream and to be honest, I like body ink. I find it fascinating to think about what compelled someone to have any specific tattoo. Now I am probably guilty of over-thinking.
