I was at a dinner recently when I realised I was the only adult at a table of eight without a tattoo.
Some tattoos were more than 20 years old. Most marked important milestones, carefully planned and designed around key moments in lives, but others were done during the tattoo frenzy that was the late 1990s, spreading up arms and down legs and across now reasonably hairy middle-aged backs.
There were butterflies, sailors, wedding proposals and zoo animals on men, and faded sunflowers stretched out on women’s bottoms that were once a little bit smaller.
And then, days later at our local pool, I saw a mother with a barbed-wire chain around her neck, a back that had been Elvised, and legs and torsos covered in large black interwoven triangles. I don’t know what you’d call them, Maori motifs maybe, but like the chests emblazoned with the names Brandon and Taylor (and Ashton and Phoenix), they are everywhere.
My favourite, though, was a grandfather who had what I thought was the word POPE inked in beautiful calligraphy up the inside of his arm. Then I realised the first P was actually a D, so he wins the tattoo prize of the day. I’d love to be around when his grandchildren learn how to spell.
And I wonder, have I missed something important by not ever having the courage to have a tattoo? If I’d had one in my 20s, and nearly did after being rained out at Meredith one year, I would now have a big black wildcat etched across my back.
I can only thank God we didn’t find one single tattoo parlour in Ballarat that night prepared to take on three very merry girls in gumboots and soggy sundresses.
And when I was travelling through the US a few years later I booked in for and then chickened out of having the words “freedom from the everyday” tattooed in Japanese letters on my right shoulder. I don’t need to be reminded of that noble little reflection these days, nor catch sight of it when I’m cleaning the kid’s bathroom.
And when is the best time to have one? At 22, with a sunrise/rainbow/Celtic-cross marking a painful break-up that might possibly make you genuinely vomit at its naïve ridiculousness when you hit middle-age?
Or is it better to wait until your 40s and have refined your aesthetic and emotional output? What would the important motif be by then – the picture of a bed neatly made by your 10-year-old, an empty to-do list, a bottle of chardonnay?
I know people who, at 45, still need to hide their bum cheeks and upper arms from their mothers. But what was once so risqué and outrageous for our generation has become a coming-of-age ritual for the next.
These days kids book in for their tatts the day they get their L plates. And some professions seem to consider it essential – models, sportheads and tradies for example. But they are used to inflicting pain on their bodies, so no extra respect for them. But do angel wings on the back of 70-year-olds help them at the end in any way, even if they are ageing footballers?
Me, I am alone on my beach towel, devoid of tell-tale stories about my former life as a bikie girl, or dolphin lover, or Guns N’Roses fan. No giveaway signs of old boyfriends’ initials or irritating teenage philosophical declarations. It’s just me and my plain old skin, marked by babies, age and too much sun, and not a drop of ink.