Tattoos Tell a Story
I was running low on inspiration tonight so I went to R. Scott Jones new blogging prompt website -https://bloggingprompts.fyi to see what fate would give me. I got "Write a blog post about any tattoos you have, and the story around why you got them and what they mean to you."
The first thing I think about whem I think about my tatoos, is "I'm sorry, Mom." I don't know whether the ear piercing I got in the 90s, my lack of a college degree or my tattoos have been the biggest disappointment.
I got my first tattoo when I was 29. It was during one of the few very short periods of my life when I was single. I was dating a woman who though tattoos were sexy and who was I to argue. So, on a weekday morning I went and in true white boy fashion picked out two Japanese characters, blindly accepting the word of a tattoo parlor wish book author for their authenticity. That's how I ended up with what I hope are the kanji for love and hate, separated by a very thin line on my right calf.
Fast forward about 10 years and my son is in town. He's in the Navy. The Iraq War had just started and he is actively speaking out against it, as am I. This was before I got sober, so I am invariably drinking beer all day. At some point we decided it would be a good idea to go get tattoos together. He has about a dozen. I was still sporting the one I'd gotten for the old girlfriend. I end up back at the same tattoo parlor getting a classic peace sign on my right bicep. Since I wasn't living a real functional life in those days, I failed to take care of it and keep it moist during the healing process. It scabbed up and looks kind of splotchy. For 20 years I've been saying that I'm going to get it touched up but I probably never will.
My third and probably last tattoo I got with my wife. We met at a 100-mile bike ride and our early relationship centered around cycling. We completed a two-day, two-hundred mile charity ride together and decided to get the logo of the event tattooed on our left calves. It wasn't her first rodeo either. She had an IronMan tattoo on her ankle from when she completed her first IronMan Triathlon. We got it done and now when the two of us are together and both waering shorts, we get a lot of comments on the matching ink. Almost no one who knows her realizes she has tatoos until there is a 5K where she shows up in all her glory, shocks them all then beats them all and goes home.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇