Tattoos

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.