Tattoos...

Getting inked (tattooed for the uninitiated) seems to be one of the more catching trends among the country’s youth these days. Oh well, we knew it was bound to happen sooner or later. The influence of western culture does get to you after a while no matter how hard you fight it. Say no to peanut-butter-and-jam all you like, escape the strands of flossing… but eventually something like mosh-pitting at a rock concert will grab your fancy.

The reasons for getting yourself inked (permanently… not the temporary street side bullshit that wide eyed village girls get done with stinking paints) are many and various. They start from the definitions of body art and the markings created as being expressions of self… all the way up to (or rather, all the way down to) looking hip and impressing the ladies.

But be the motivations for your decision as they are, there is no escaping the fact that symbols (and that is what most tattoos essentially are, even the written words and Chinese characters) have a lot of gravitas. Even if you are getting tattooed to look cool (unlike some guys who do it as a unification of their psychological and physical beings or whatever!) you know that tattoos when done right are things you can were proudly. So… full steam ahead my man. Get that butterfly tattooed to your hip as soon as possible.

I got my first legitimate tattoo done recently. After rescheduling twice or thrice (I was bringing the date up actually… so don’t go accusing me of being a chicken) I went and got it done. And what hit me more than any other part of the experience including the pain or the slight awkwardness and having to sit shirtless in a crowded hall while a guy with a needle poked at my chest, was the barrage of questions that everyone started asking me the moment I stepped out of the place.

Some of course were perfectly valid and legitimate things, deserving to be asked… like “What the F**K were you thinking?” or “Do you know that you’ll be kicked out of your house?” But some other questions that folks asked were a little less subtle and a little more annoying. But no worries, without all those Q’s and my less than honest A’s… I wouldn’t have anything to blog about right now. So… thank you stupid people, thank you very much indeed.

11. What is that thing?

Yep… hard to believe that this only made to as high as number eleven isn’t it? People ask this after pulling your t-shirt down to sneak a peek at your torso, and fail to make anything out in the inconvenient lack of lighting to facilitate visibility inside your shirt. The best reply to this piece of stupidity is something on the lines of, “It’s something to identify me when I’m dead… you know if my head gets caved in and you have pinched my wallet!”

10. Ooh… It didn’t hurt, did it?

Now you night think that this is a standard query, but after the first five hundred times you’ve answered it… it stops not being outright bugging. After that, the response to the question becomes, “Not really. What would be painful about having a few thousand puncture wounds being made on your chest?”

9. So why’d you do it?

Learn to read a tattoo folks. If someone gets a tattoo done on their arm, and its meaning is not obvious to you, he did it to look cool. If people do random tribal patterns, they do it score chicks. If someone gets a tattoo on any part of their body that is NOT visible to the general populace then, it’s personal and he probably has reasons for not wanting to talk about it! All other kinds of tattoos are self explanatory, for example, who wouldn’t be able to figure out what getting “Victoria” tattooed to your arm means? Exactly, means you’re cheating on the dame… you catch on fast! My response is usually something like, “I don’t know. But if I knew I’d have to answer so many questions, I might have reconsidered.”

8. Do you know that it’s permanent?

Yeah right, that’s entirely new piece of information that entirely turns my world upside down for me… bozo! I just paid with money and blood to get it done, and you don’t think I’d be privy to that piece of trivia? My favorite response to this comment is, “It is? Oh no! Is your dumbness permanent too?”

7. That’s not real, is it?

I have never been sure about what exactly a FAKE tattoo is supposed to be. I prefer to humor the bugger asking me this with a smile and an entirely non caustic answer like, “Nah. I got scared of the needle so I ran off and colored it with crayons. Do you want to try and rub it off?” Needless to say, that the second part of the response is only in the case of an attractive member of the opposite sex.

6. What did your parents have to say about that?

Yeah right. If parental word was the guideline that told us how we ran our lives, then every single thing we love would be all but extinct. I prefer to convey the fact that I haven’t told my parents yet in as delicate a manner as possible. “They asked me if I wanted a motorcycle to go along with it.”

5. Just how drunk were you when you got that done?

Plain annoying, I tell you! And trust me; I know what I am talking about, having gotten a similar ‘drunk’ tattoo in the distant past. Now, when my carefully thought-out, self-designed and gotten-while-sober (though it would have helped numb the pain if I wasn’t) tattoo is insulted, I do get a little cranky. “Hmm… let’s see. Less drunk than when I burnt your house… a lot drunker than when I slept with your girlfriend, now that would not have happened without the booze!”

4. I would never do that!

Everyone is entitled to an opinion; it’s a free country after all. But please don’t give it to me when I couldn’t be any less interested in knowing what you would and would not do. Shrugging and walking off with a casual “Good” is as much attention that the bloke likely deserves.

3. Hey, I didn’t know that you were a freak.

Not mildly annoying but outright irritating this ‘holier than thou’ line of comments. I prefer to keep it light though and not get into any major arguments… “Well that makes two of us. Did the nose job hurt?”

2. Isn’t there some kind of health risk involved?

Seriously, do people think that I got my tattoo when stoned and passed out after a brawl in prison? It’s just so weird to have to explain myself to people that I am not carrying a bunch of STDs now, that I find it a lot simpler to merely reply with… “Course not, I took my own needle with me, found it right outside, in a dumpster.”

1. Won’t you regret that you ever got that done when you are old?

It’s quite hard to keep hostility from your tone when the same person asks you this for the fifth in a span of twenty minutes. As much as I would like to reply with something like, “You tell me, do you regret your face now?” I keep it marginally more sophisticated and go for responses similar to, “Don’t worry! I hate it already, so I guess I’ll have learned to live with by then.”

On a serious note, getting tattooed, as awesome as it might be should indeed be preceded by some amount of serious thought. If you want to get your girlfriends name tattooed to your arm, bad idea, you’ll run out of space after the first five.

If you feel like getting something done, consider the idea for a week, then stroll to the tattoo parlor to watch some people bleed and scream, if you still want to do it, discuss the idea with some bloke whose opinions you value. And never ever get tattooed when you’re drunk.

Oh… and be prepared to answer more questions than at a freaking job interview, once you are tattooed and good to go.