I hear you asking, why?
You walk into a pub and feel countless eyes like roaches crawling over you, including the two beady smoke- stricken eyes you sit yourself down next to at the bar. You cozy your cheeks on the stool and place your hands on the bar top, trying to gain the attention of the staff and avoid the attention of the owner of the beady eyes next to you, who begins sidling over. His shirt has some sauce stains above where its usual tuck margin begins from his sausage roll at lunch break. The pink stomach pokes out from under the sauce stains like some hairless young marsupial out of its pouch, as if it has eyes on you as well. Behind his salt and pepper bristles, and between the jelly spittle partially dried at the corners of his mouth, his serpent like tongue flicks at the air smelling for the right time to fire his line of questioning. Your order is far off being taken, eyes are sliding over you and the spittle is sucked and licked in preparation. Don’t you dare, you think. Don’t you fucking dare.
“My missus has a couple, she’s got one with heaps of colour, like a photo. It’s of a tree but in the leaves it’s our kids name, Damon.”
He’s slid his stool a foot closer. The spittle is now close enough to dislodge and fire at any more excited mentions of Damon.
“I’ll show you a photo”. The “ffff” in photo shoots some white jelly bullets that land on your shirt, before he leans to his pocket to fish out his phone. The lean rides the untucked shirt up once again showing his soft marsupial flesh, before a phone is slammed into your face.
“Pretty good eh! The guys got a 6 month wait, he’s out in Dandenong but he worked in London once. Like a photo! The tree is for growth and yeah the leaves make the name Damon. That’s our kid, I’ll find a photo. I reckon if I was to get one I’d get a tree right here.” He slaps his forearm hard with his sausage red hand. He points one of the chipolata fingers at your wrist, “That one must’ve hurt, why’d you get that one?”
Covered in spit, colour tree Damon portrait burned into your retina and without a drink, you don’t know what to say. You wish it was because of the assault you had just endured, but it’s worse. The cross you bear is that you really can’t explain why.
As a tattooer, I often ask why people of our generation get tattooed. The answers I receive are usually either in nonchalant ambivalence; where you openly admit to not knowing, laugh the question off and rip a bong, or a narc-like earnestness; where the tattoo encapsulates every moment from writhing as ejaculate on the back seat of a car, up until this very point that they are explaining that the leaves of the tree spell the name of their son Damon. Occasionally I receive an answer about aesthetics, which marries the worst qualities of the other two answers and wraps it in a bow of style.
Even more occasionally, there are good answers, great answers! Answers that make me want to laser all my tattoos off and get the exact thing you’re getting, or to remove your skin and dress myself in it, go to a bar and wait for Damon’s dad to ask me why did I get that one.
The problem is, whenever and whoever I ask, I get a starkly different answer. The complexity of life and its visual spectacles might leave you feeling as though, like the questions of the universe, there too many innumerable and indigestible reasons to fathom, and it’s best a question not answered at all lest Aristotle turn his attention to it.
When I think of that, I remember something my friend Matt McCabe told me when my dad died under strange circumstances. Matt said “Life’s pretty fucking boring. This cunt died, and life is still mundane”. Hearing those words in the most traumatic period of my life was exactly what I needed to hear, and I think its given me a pretty good answer to Damon’s dad as to why we get tattooed.
Life is pretty fucking boring. Really, it is. The marked exciting moments we cherish or wish to forget forever, where we feel so alive and present that the rest of our meaningless life flashes in front of our eyes before washing into the ether of lost memory, may amount to five minutes. We spend our lives trying to harvest these cherishables like crops, and the bounty of our yield on our death bed is a measure of our successes as a human being. There is not one tattoo I don’t remember getting, and I’m guessing you may be the same. Tattoos capacities to demarcate a moment in time, simulates these great moments of grandeur and glory in an easily accessible context. On my death bed, my yield of life will be bolstered by the memories attached to my tattoos. I don’t necessarily need to hike a mountain top or find love, because I can go and get a walking rude finger farting tattooed on my willy. All of these events will yield a memory, but one of them is hell of a lot easier to come by.
Next time Damon’s dad starts showing me that fucked up tattoo his wife got, I’ll pull out my penis with the farting rude finger and tell him I don’t give a shit. When I’m lying on my death bed, thinking about what consequential undertakings I’ve been through, I will look at all my tattoos and they will remind me that I am here.