It's better than a kick in the face with a golf shoe...

Today, on my way to the lunch counter, in the basement of our building, to get my favorite breakfast of a toasted bagel and cream cheese and chocolate milk, a woman behind me on the stairs complemented me on my tattoo. Because she was behind me and above me, I instinctively reached for my neck, where one of my tattoos is, as she said, simultaneously, “it’s a shamrock, right?” Ah, she had meant the one on my ankle. But she saw my neck and asked about that one as well.

“Oh that? That’s a triskele, it’s a Celtic Symbol.”

“Nice,” she said, “I like that one even more.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“I don’t see the big deal about tattoos. My family didn’t like when I got my tattoo 22 years ago,” she said.

“Well,” I countered, “it meant a lot more for a woman to get a tattoo in 1984 than it did 5 years ago. I mean, my mom paid for my first tattoo.”

“Really? I can’t imagine any mother buying a tattoo for her child. Well, have a great day.” She really couldn’t imagine why a woman would buy tattoos for her children- to irritate her husband of course!

My father, being raised in a very paternalistic family, harbored the delusion that he had the same control over his household. He was mistaken. He actually live in a house with three exceptionally smart, fiercely independent women and push as he may, we didn’t conform. One of the areas he tried to be rigid about was body art. He fought my mom when she let me get my second pair of earrings when I was ten. He fought about Tami’s piercings and any conversation we had about this, ended with him booming, “YOU WILL NEVER GET TATTOOS!”To which we replied, “but of course we will.” We were very insolent as teenagers, but that’s like saying we were very pale as albinos.

This argument happened at least once a month for three years and finally, I was 20 and my sister was 18 and we were both of the legal age to get tattoos, and yet we continued to merely threaten my father with them. These arguments almost always became all encompassing with my father eventually blaming my mother for everything. My mother grew sick of the arrangement and the cyclical argument. So, one Christmas, she totally called our bluff and got us gift certificates to her friends’, Gwen and Tara’s, shop in Boulder. Now, we had to put up or shut up. We now had the means to get the tattoos and my mother knew if we didn’t get them, we wouldn’t argue with my father and if we did get them, my father would stop caring a few weeks later.

My mother was very clever that way.And that is the story of my first tattoo.