Let Me Tell You About Tattoos*

                                                                

 

*I re-watched The English Patient recently and this is a paraphrased quote from it. DM if you want more deets.
 
I was watching the Winter Olympics opening ceremony last week and of course I was thinking of Kim and how much fun we would have had making our mildly snide comments. And I know we’d have saved our best ribbing for Snoop Dogg, JD Vance, Mariah Carey, Shaun White and his inability to stop talking about himself; and, most of all, Charlize Theron - WTF was a white South African doing at an event whose theme is harmony?

Anyway, I re-read the Kim post because I was missing her and I realized that I forgot to include details about us getting our tattoos, a day I can unequivocally say was one of the best of my life.

Despite my very low pain threshold, I’d always wanted to get a tattoo, and I always knew where I wanted it (inner right ankle). At first, I did not know what I wanted it to be of, but I eventually decided on the Greek symbol for my astrological sign. (When I was checking those signs out, I really liked the one for Scorpio because it is basically my first initial and the southern chick in me loves monograms. And Scorpio falls between October 23 to November 21, so people would still be up for celebrating, which they are not on my birthday because they are all partied out by then.)

I never got around to getting it (cheapness and laziness amongst the two (only?) reasons).
 
But then, one night, during one of our many phone calls, Kim was discussing her upcoming 30^th birthday and said she wanted to get a second tattoo (her first is one of the Grateful Dead teddy bears) to celebrate. I then told her I’d always wanted to get one. Now, for the life of me I cannot remember who said it first, but a lot of squealing in delight followed when we both found out we wanted the Greek symbol for our respective astrological signs. What are the odds? That made it inevitable then – off we’d go and get tats together!

We chose a Saturday, in Boulder, at an underground tattoo shop on the Pearl Street mall. E. joined us, and D. was invited but for some reason could not make it. A co-worker of mine was having a party that afternoon, so we decided to head there after the tats (spoiler alert: we didn’t).

It was quite an ordeal for both of us. For me, because of my low pain threshold, and her because it was a pretty large tat on a very sensitive body part (yep, it was a tramp stamp). But despite Kim’s being about four times the size of mine, hers took about 30 minutes less than mine because I was making the tattoo artist laugh so much, she had to stop to compose herself on multiple occasions. I was doing what I call Negative Zen: I was pretending the pain was happening to someone else. Usually, it is people I know and dislike, but this time it was just people I dislike, because the night before, we ‘d gone to our usual bar on the mall and ran into J. and his new girlfriend. At that time, I wanted to be his girlfriend (but not anymore; nope, he is one of my closest friends and we are family now). That being said, he once told me his dad looked like Lee Majors and well, Lee Majors was my first crush. We were going to get married and follow the Harlem Globetrotters around America. I didn’t take into account the fact that I was about 10 years old at the time. I have told J. that he should probably never introduce me to his dad unless he wants me to be his stepmother!

So, there I was, getting my tattoo and I would take a deep breath and say, “It’s happening to…” and just insert the name of one of J.’s many, many conquests. (And, boy, there were many. At the time, we think it was at about 50 (I was about No.45) and so I had a lot of targets for the pain.)

After we were tatted up, we decided to have a quick drink at the bar. (When the bartender heard where we’d just come from and what we had done, she gave us our first drinks for free because we were “brave girls.”) That was about 2pm. Around 7pm, we realized two things: we were not going to get to the party; and we were hungry.

We decided on a Thai restaurant nearby because one of the waiters had a crush on D. and always gave her a discount or created specials just for her.  Now, we weren’t so drunk that we thought D. was with us, we just knew that D.’s hotness eclipsed temporal and spatial portals and we’d still get a discount.
And even if we didn’t, nothing could spoil such a great day.

I miss Kim terribly. I hate that we never got to watch another Olympics opening ceremony. I hate that a boy took her away from me. I hate that our friendship ended in such a miserable way. But most of all I hate that American culture puts so much pressure on women to have the perfect wedding that my friend didn’t acknowledge my birthday because she was worried about whether or not she should have a koi pond at her wedding.