misAdventures of Workmonkey 3.0

Dear Girl with a Tattoo,

I saw you the other day walking down 7th avenue. You were of medium height, in your early twenties, wearing worn-out flip flops, cradling your Nokia cell phone between your tanned shoulder and your thrice-pierced ear. You walked as if you had no bones, your limbs loosely moving, as if made of licorice. You used your hands often when you talked, like you were finger-painting the air. You exuded an air of self-importance, thinking you were the sun, and the problems you were complaining about were the planets. From what I could gather from your end of the conversation, with me aptly filling in for the other side of the phone, a guy named Thomas was dicking you over. This Thomas was apparantly telling you one thing, and doing another. And you are fine with that, but you just want him to tell you what the deal was. I soon lost interest when I became distracted by the large, unsightly tatoo covering a large portion of your lower back, a lower back I could see in clear view thanks in no large part to the low-cut Seven jeans you were wearing, and white Gap tanktop clinging to your sweat, a tanktop much too short for your torso.

This tattoo engulfed my imagination. It was of no discernable image, but rather a mesh of colors and shapes, straight from the imagination of your tattoo artist to your skin. It seemed to be something of an eagle, with wings spread, the tips reaching the beginnings (or ends, depending how you look at it) of the slight roll of fat pushed up by your jeans. This eagle-type creature (may have been a Phoenix or mythical creature from American Indians, as that seems to be today's theme in tattoos, using an image from a culture you are not a part of. Black men with chinese characters, white fraternity boys with African artwork, girls from Nebraska with ol' Irish letters, etc.) was not deftly created, as either you were drunk when receiving it, or the tattoo artist was drunk when giving it. The ink seemed to leak out of the feathers, and the lines were blurred, seemingly viewed through a pair of glasses that had been dipped in vegetable oil. There was some sort of spider or other arachnid clinging to the beak of the eagle-creature. Somewhere on the breast of the bird-creature was an initial, or some sort of text .. it seemed to make out MJZ or MGT or something similar.

I wanted to inform you, Tattoo Girl, that i have now seen tattoos on girls like you for about eight years now. These tattoos do not make you a bad girl, or, for that matter, even an interesting girl. Your sorority probably made you get it a few years ago, and you wanted to make a statement, which you did. You are telling me you are a higher middle-class girl from a well-to-do town somewhere in Illinois or Massachusetts. You drive a Volkwagen Jetta, black, 2003. Your name is Laurie, or Jenn, or Tamara. You smoke about ten cigarettes a day, usually only when drinking, which is three times a week. You own Britanny Spears CDs, and think she is cute. The most dangerous thing you ever did was doorbell ditching your History professor's house when a sophomore in college. You're about as adventurous and different as toilet paper. You want your tattoo to represent that you aren't from the suburbs, that you aren't a goody goody, that you didn't go to University of Maryland on your parents dollar, that you didn't spend your junior summer backpacking through Western Europe. Your tattoo, ironically, is an image of all these things. It is the mark of the suburbs. The mark of being from a rich family. The mark of being as rough around the edges as caviar. You are branded cattle. You sister, with the bumble bee on the ankle tattoo, hides it with a sock. Your other sister, the butterfly above the left ass-cheek girl, only shows it when in a bathing suit. But you are from the same club.

Tattoos have been wrought of any meaning. Used in the past to mark criminals or royalty, identify sailors and soldiers, express heritage and rank, mark membership in a clan or family, now it is used as a form of self-expression for pissed-off suburban chicks who have a secret guilt that daddy makes six-figures a year and the closest she came to starving was when TCBY ran out of White Chocolate Supreme. If you are going to get a tattoo, at least try something original. Put a full Tahitian-style tattoo over the left region of your face, injected by ink from native plants with a bird-skull needle. And get the image of something true to your heritage, such as a recreation of the BMW you drive, the Orange Juluis you drink at the mall, or the shots of Jamermeister you drink at the bars.Think it through. Be authentic. Stay true to what you are. If not Chinese, don't put their characters on your arm. If not American Indian, don't use their imagery simply because you think it is cool. In ten years you'll stop thinking it is so cool, anyway, and you won't be able to do anything about it then. Leave eagles, bumblebees and butterflies to nature, and, while your at it, try to find your own. I myself recommend leaving your skin unmarked. If you are unhappy with the way it looks, take it up with God, not your local tattoo parlor.