Tattoos and me (or should that be Tattoos and I?)
Some of you may have noticed that Rob has a lot of tattoos. I, however, have only one at the moment. It's an ankle band tattoo that I got for our wedding after I had a dream about it. In my mind, it's my wedding ring, and far better than the silver kladdagh finger ring that I frequently can't wear because of my arthritis. If my ankle starts to swell up, I don't have to take the tattoo off. Folks may protest and say, "What if you get divorced?". Well, I suppose anything is possible, but divorce wouldn't erase the fact that I was married. I was married and divorced once before I met Rob. I could have easily had that first marriage annulled via the Catholic Church due to the reasons for the civil divorce (I was raised and married as a Catholic), but I decided not to do so. The marriage was real, it was valid, and it was a part of my life for nine long years. I decided instead to leave the Catholic church - fuck you; I don't agree with your stance on divorce, birth control, abortion or a large number of other issues so why the hell hang around anymore? But I've never joined another denomination. Maybe it's true that once a Catholic, always a Catholic because I just can't get into the lack of ritual these other churches offer. I have no desire to go sit in some church where the time is divided between the choir singing and some preacher expounding HIS interpretation of the Bible and exhorting me to go "minister" to others. In my mind, religion/spiritually is very personal thing and not something you go about cramming down other people's throats. But I digress, this post is supposed to be about tattoos. I generally group tattooed people into two categories - those who get one and never get another and those who get one and never stop. Rob would be the second category and while one would think that I fell into the first category, that's not true at all. I have rather elaborate plans for my back and my arms. It just hasn't ... umm... "gelled" yet. You see, I have a concept, but I don't have all the pieces in place yet. I know a few of the specifics - an oak tree split by lightning (my friend Cris will get that one), a stone tower on a rocky island or islet, something from the sky attacking something from the ocean, and without going into more detail, it's all very symbolic. I'm sure Hez could come up with a great piece even from my vaguest description, but I want all of the pieces to mean something very specific. No one is going to put ink on my body unless it represents some important part of my life. Plus, I'd like it all to be a part of some coherent whole picture, much like we'd all like our real lives to be, and this is the inherent flaw in my plan. As humans, we rarely have the whole picture of what is going on, the whys or why nots of what going on in the big picture of things. I don't want to fill up my back completely with symbolisms today, because I hope, I have at least 20 more years of life experiences to chronicle. So the dilemma is, what do I ink today and where do I leave space for what happens tomorrow and how do I tie this all into a coherent piece down the road? I don't have the answer for that yet and therefore, I don't have anymore tattoos right now.