And don’t get me started on tattoos, Ooops, too late. I
remember a day, about 45 years ago, one of our little group of girlfriends
availed herself of a very tiny butterfly on her buttock. When she told us
about her little excursion to the dark side, naturally, we “pumps and pearls”
girlfriends were scandalized. A tattoo! Tattoos were meant for drunken sailors
and licentious girls who frequented pool parlors! But not us, we were almost
virgins, for heaven’s sake. The shock reverberated for years. Time went by and we ladies grew up, scattered to all
parts of the world, became more accepting of others, and ourselves,
after all, we were the Beatles generation. We wore fishnet stockings and white
lipstick, so what’s a butterfly tattoo amongst friends. A few years ago we all found ourselves in or near Los Angeles, so we had a happy reunion, at which
time we ate foods high in cholesterol, drank pretty colored drinks, maligned
bad boyfriends and ex-husbands, and ruminated generally about the foibles of
our youth. The matter of the tiny butterfly came up, to which she responded
“oh yeah, now it’s a monarch”. Yes, we were in hysterics and no, we did not ask to see it. The singular truth of this old joke comes to mind: a senior nurse tells a
young nurse that the patient she just bathed had a tattoo on his penis that said
‘swan’. The next day the young nurse bathes him, then tells the senior nurse, “you
were wrong, it doesn’t say ‘swan’, it says ‘Saskatchewan’”. And there is the
lesson. Everything changes; nothing stays the same.
At the gym, I saw a couple of women with the f hole tattooed
on their backs. For the uninitiated, that is the italicized double f that is
found on the front of the violin that contributes to its resonance, and not the
figurative description of certain regions of a woman’s anatomy. While the look
does conjure a certain fantasy (making beautiful music together?), what will
happen to that tattoo in a few years when the body stretches and the violin
becomes a cello. Everything changes. Another young lady had a Buddhist phrase
tattooed in a circle around her belly button. I can’t wait to see what that
will look like when she’s pregnant; a bull’s eye comes to mind, not to mention
what her stomach will look like after she has the baby. Nothing stays the same. And then there’s my
favorite “what the hell was she thinking” tattoo. A woman was getting out of
the gym shower and, at first glance, I thought she had an unfortunate amount of
body hair running from her waist to the top of her legs but I quickly
realized that she had a tattoo of a snake pushing out of her belly button and
winding down to her plumbing. Whoa! I did not have the temerity to ask “WTF?”,
thinking that a woman who would have that tattooed on her body is capable of
decking me just for asking, and did I really want to lose my teeth over such an
inquisition. Nope. I showered, thinking I had to ask my brother about his reaction
if he undressed a woman and found that ‘picture’ awaiting him. His response,
“leave quickly and quietly”. He agreed that while it conjured certain images,
none of them were good.
I’ve come to realize that each generation ups the ante on
shock value, so I can’t wait to see what the next generation will bring. In the meantime, I'm thinking of a tattoo on my butt, something that reads "best before 04-07-2048", my 100th birthday. Then again, I don't have a tattoo for the same reason you don't put bumper stickers on Ferraris.
