When I first felt little fingers trace the lines of the small three-inch long tattoo that is graces my lower back (can you please suppress your desire to call it a “tramp stamp” in front of my children?), I knew that explaining writing on your body was going to be complicated – as complicated as explaining the symbol itself and what it represented (Mars, Pluto—yup, the non-planet—and Scorpio, my astrological sign). I never thought that explaining this to a child would make me feel like such an adult. And I never thought that I would simultaneously feel guilty about and proud of a decision I made.
Everyone has her own feelings about tattoos. I don’t really have a specific one. I think it’s a nice way to express yourself, if that’s what you like. I don’t think it’s for the fickle or the shy or the meek. Tattoos are statements and are meant to be seen. If you choose to make that statement, I think you should be ready to discuss what it means. I mean, I believe that for other people (not me) when it comes to my children, of course.
That being said, I also think that tattoos are personal, expressive, and often reflect the person’s life at the time they got the tattoo. Some people get more tattoos, some people remove them. Each person has a fundamentally different relationship with the markings on their body.
For me, my tattoo was an eighteen-year-old’s expression of “So THERE!” I had a good relationship with my parents, was barely out past curfew or partying on weekends — but I was young for my grade. Sent to Kindergarten at age 4, I was the last to turn 18 of all my friends, and was determined to do it with a bang.
A tattoo gives you street cred into college and even after. But once you meet the man you want to marry and learn he’s not all that into tattoos, you wonder if asserting your independence in 1998 was worth it. (Pssst, it’s NOT!)
Nothing humbles you more than your child, whether it’s the “How many cookies are you going to eat, Mommy?” or the “My Mom has a vagina kind of penis!” exclamations, one thing is for sure: You might have gotten away with your BS before, but you will not anymore.
When we are twenty-somethings, not yet jaded by the trials of pregnancy and motherhood, we have little reason to think how life will be at thirty, thirty-five, or forty. Who wants to think about how things will be when they are old?
And then upon reaching age 30, or 35, or 40 you reach another phase. The let’s-just-pretend-this-never-happened phase. The rewrite-your-own-history phase. When you have children and have to start explaining past lives to them, the fact is that if they don’t ask, we don’t need to come up with a suitable backstory.
But with this tattoo, I’m done for. It’s an affirmation of the worst kind. It says, you were once young and you are now old all in the same breath. It screams rebellion and mischief. But mostly it says I was once not your mother, I was once just myself.
And maybe that’s the best explanation I have. This is something Mommy did before she was Mommy. When she was someone like you— making decisions and mistakes and learning from them, one flawed symbol at a time.