Needles and pins

My daughter and my eldest son are considering getting a tatoo. They've been thinking this for quite a while and when they went to Amsterdam last year before their troubles began they decided to go ahead. They then decided to have a crisis tatoo something that would show their commitment and solidarity to one another. Now that their relationship is back to gether and on the mend they are talking about again.

Now I am quite clear about tatoos. I don't want one. At my age the texture of my skin is totally different to what it was when I was 30 and a tatoo would look awful. I know this because my father is covered in tatoos that he had done during the war. His tatoos are all about boats or mythical sea monsters and the occasional bare naked lady with hastily added under clothing after he was married. Stange though - he was in the RAF not the Navy. I digress.

My father's tatoos now only have one colour, dark blue, even though they were black and red and green when he was younger. From the age of forty he has said on many occasions that he wished that he hadn't had them done. I would think the same if my upper body was covered in sea snakes and galleons. Nowadays tatoos are cool. I like the ethnic ones the Maori inspired twirls, they look good but they do cover an awfully large part of your body. The tatoos that Wesley Snipes had in the movie Blade are good example. I also like the yakuza tatoos from Japan. But, and its a big but, would I want one? The answer has to be no. I don't fully understand why anyone would want one on their back. It would give their partner something to look at while they were having doggy style sex (I suppose thats a good enough reason as any)! I suspect the the real reason is that it hurts less on the back than anywhere else.

Back in 1999 I worked in an office where two of the girls went and got tatoos on their backs. They designed the tatoos themselves and went to person they could trust and ended up with something rhey were happy with. As a joke I bought a tatoo magazine for the girl who had the pink pig done because she said that in a perverse sort of way she enjoyed the pain. It was quite an extreme magazine and she said somewhat indignantly "do you see me as this type of person?" Of course I said yes. Exactly one month later she had another tatoo done on her stomach this time. It was a pattern from the magazine, a small dragon ridden by an even smaller goth-like woman. She said that she had almost passed out with the pain. I bumped into her in a supermarket in 2002 she'd had two more, on her arms this time. She was hooked but annoyed about the first tatoo she had done because it was too cute and prevented her from having a larger more expansive tatoo on her back.

These things can be habit forming! If I wanted a tatoo it would have to be in the form of a bar code across the back of my neck but it would have to be a readable bar code. You know the sort of thing Name, National Insurance number, Age and message, something like: Give this man beer!