Meditation on Tattoos

I spent years on Meddletown.

I wrote a four-hundred-page manuscript my senior year of high school. A story of androids and love and betrayals. The promises of dystopia and maybe an apocalypse.

In a moment of striking maturity, I realized I wasn’t ready to do this novel justice and elected to table it over my college years. After college, I returned to it, faithfully. I recognized half of the manuscript was crap, and slashed and rewrote. I showed it to a professor I had bonded with at the university where I worked next, and he made vague and sweeping recommendations that led to the next major overhaul after I had moved to Baltimore.

I rewrote it. And I rewrote it. And I rewrote it.

The concept of the decagon became central--a ten-sided figure with hugely complicated ramifications that are too specific to justify a full explanation here. Rest assured, it was an integral part of the android technology that I wrote about, and doubled as a symbol for resistance to what amounted to a campaign for robots to replace humans, to the point that members of the secret resistance corps marked their skin with decagon tattoos.

Around this same time, I reached the point in life when people start asking one another about tattoos. There’s a period in my late twenties when it became less in vogue to actively show ink, as opposed to allusions that you had it, but it was covered on the back of a shoulder on a hip or a thigh. Sometimes it was a hint to more going on in someone’s life than meets the surface, sometimes a tease in a flirtatious exchange about such a tattoo not being visible now, with the implication it might be visible to you at another time.

Thus it came into fashion to ask if someone had any tattoos.

When I answered no, the follow-up questions tended to fall somewhere along the spectrum of why not? and well, if you did have one, what would you get?

My default (and true) answer was that I didn’t have an aversion to tattoos, but I also didn’t feel confident enough in my love of anything that I would have feel comfortable branding my skin with it. I can only imagine the Creed lyrics or pro wrestling slogans or symbols I might bear had I been pressed to choose the subject of a tattoo at any given point in my past. I’ve cited the example of a friend, who at one point badly wanted a tattoo of a bowling pin to symbolize his love of that sport.

A veritable sea of hypothetical regret.

In regards to what tattoo I would have gotten, I came to respond with the decagon. A manifestation of my commitment to the Meddletown project over the course of a decade, not to mention a symbolic reference to my own work, replicating a symbol from it in the real world. I even thought to myself that, if the novel were to see the light of day and achieve any noteworthy success, that might be the occasion to actually get the tattoo.

Of course, in reality, the novel still wasn’t working. I tabled the project again—this time, perhaps, for good, given my level of pleasant surprise at how many other, objectively better, creative projects opened up for me after I put that one on the shelf.

Still, I think of the tattoo every now and again. I consider former pro wrestler CM Punk, one of my favorites, who went on record to say that he pitied anyone without tattoos because it means they don’t believe in anything as deeply as he does. Amidst a field of ink that litters his hands and arms and chest and back, one of the most prominent a completely un-ironic Pepsi logo over his left shoulder that represents not only his enjoyment of the soft drink but his straight edge lifestyle.

I think of my fiancee’s tattoo of the word “breathe” as a reminder to take a deep breath when life gets to be too much, that she translated into a very visual reminder for kids who had trouble resisting the urge to express themselves with their fists at camp. I think of my friend with a tattoo that looks like a stamp from the post office, denoting her hometown, love of writing, and sense of nostalgia for an era of sending letters in one compact space above her heart. I think of any number of esoteric symbols on other friends, to denote inside jokes, pop culture references, and important moments in their lives. Names. Dates. Faces.

And then I land back on the Jordin Sparks song, “Tattoo.” Saccharine, cliché pop music, exactly the likes of which one might expect from an American Idol winner, that repeats, “just like a tattoo, I’ll always love you.” The appropriation of something cool and personal to translate into some both popular and fundamentally uncool. How quickly the meaning of the word tattoo might change, let alone any given tattoo itself.

And so, my skin remains unmarked for now, save for birthmarks and a handful of scars, most of them too small or to faded to spot without close inspection. I may tattoo my body one day, but still await that word, symbol, or moment that I not only believe in or find worthy, but that feels befitting a permanent mark all its own.