Look What You've Done To Yourself
It's mum's fifty-second birthday and I'm in a Blue Mountains cabin watching my two-year-old self open Christmas presents on home video. His tiny face on the screen is unrecogniseable as me today, but I know who this little, smiling boy is. He rips the paper off his gifts and shows them to his Mum, who pretends to be surprised and unaware of what Santa's brought him. Then, a five-year-old me sits alone in the corner at my sister's seventh birthday party. She and her friends are playing pass the parcel, and the camera, operated by Dad, zooms in on the frowning face wearing a plastic party-hat and looking left out.
“Look at that little face,” Mum says. “Look at what you've done to yourself! I can't believe you put scars and tattoos all over that little bloke!”
The truth behind what she's said becomes apparent to me. What have I done to myself? I look at the little guy on the screen and for the first time I feel a slight regret for having ever gotten tattooed.
“I can't believe I did that to him,” I say, semi-seriously. “I can't believe that's me!” Who is this kid on screen, and what have I done to him?
I got my first tattoo when I was seventeen by a midget named Jamie Giant, 'the worlds smallest tattoo artist', who's claim to fame is being the guy in the Bra Boys film who set himself on fire and jumped off a cliff (I think he may have been a bit of a bullshit artist too). There wasn't too much thought behind getting it done, apart from the fact that from a young age I'd made the definite decision that I'd eventually get some ink done. My neighbour Liam and I walked into the studio with less than solidly formed ideas about what we were going to get etched onto our skin, only to leave soon after in a fit of laughter after the one-and-a-half foot tall Giant insisted on getting our lettering, “bigger... The bigger the better!” in his midgety, munchkin voice that resembled that of a ten-year-old Oompa Loompa who'd been smoking a pack-a-day since he was in the womb. We told him we were going to get some lunch, but really we just went around the corner and rolled around in hysterics, like Beavis and Butthead being denied the privilege of laughing at juvenile things mentioned in sex-ed class. When we'd finally controlled ourselves, we re-entered the parlor where Jamie was talking to his two-year-old daughter. She could barely walk or talk, but was still taller than the man. He put on some cartoons for her and I looked at Liam who was biting his lip, desperately trying not to crack up again.
“Alright, Let's do this,” I said, knowing that the pain would be the only way to kill the hilarity of the situation.
“All right, mate. Who's goin' first?”
“Wow! Lookin' good. It's almost done,” she'd said as Liam tried to keep composed.
“Oh... really? Didn't take long at all!” he lied through gritted teeth, looking like he'd been sitting there for hours.
“Yeah mate, almost there. Doesn't hurt that bad does it?” said Jamie, sounding like he'd inhaled a helium balloon. “At least you fellas are tough, we had some young bloke in here two days ago that jumped out of the bloody chair. Some people are just pussies, so we don't tattoo anyone under eighteen.” I chuckled at the sight of a heavily-tattooed midget, wearing the grin of a maniac, standing on a stool over Liam's tiny, shirtless, underage frame. Then Mum called. It must've been the unmistakeable 'zzzst' sound a tattoo gun makes as it rips through somebodies flesh that gave it away.
“You're either at the dentist or getting a tattoo, aren't you?” she said. “You hate the dentist!”
My parents come from a generation of hippies that grew up in a society with a majority of like-minded young people who have now all grown old and begun to dislike things just as their parents did. They hate tattoos and piercings and ripped clothing and tight clothing and boys wearing low-cut, skinny-jeans and girls wearing thigh-baring mini-skirts and short-shorts, and they'll take any opportunity to grumble about them and tell young people what's what. I find it frustrating and sometimes hilarious that when I hang out with these people at parties they always tell me that my tattoos are “a hideous addition to my body”, and to “pull my bloody pants up”. Yet, for a bunch of people that grew up with a movement that represented and stood for freedom and humanity, it all seems slightly hypocritical. Weren't they the ones who were fighting for our rights to be able to express our freedoms in any way we wanted to? Aren't they the reason why kids like me can dress the way we want, express ourselves how we want and live the way we want? I don't understand why they simply cannot grasp how closely this relates to them complaining about their parents telling them to cut their hair and put some shoes on. I'm dead sure that most of them would be familiar with Max Yasgur's famous speech to the organisers of Woodstock on pretty much the same topic. Perhaps they just enjoy ripping on the young guy, or maybe they're just jealous of my youth. Whichever it is, I don't have the heart to bring it up, I'd rather them just berate me.
I woke up the day after getting my first tattoo and immediately had to check if it was still there. Unsurprisingly, it was. The knowledge that it would be staying there forever (or for the rest of my life, at least) finally dawned on me. I thought about myself as an old man, with withered arms and skin, still rocking the name of the street I grew up in on my arm, along with a lot more tattoos I've managed to pick up along the way.
Straight away you start noticing the ink in every glance and every mirror. You keep forgetting about it for a few minutes, going to rub it off before the raw pain slaps you back into reality. The same sort of feeling occurs each time you pay the tattoo artist a visit, although, never nearly as much as after the first. The more you have, the less you care, pretty much. Then there's the initial regret, which I'm sure is always varied between each individual and each specific tattoo, but it's always there in some form. It usually starts when the first bag of douche approaches you asking what that drunken Mexican past out against a cactus actually means to you, and you can't think of a good enough answer so you just say, “I dunno, bro, I guess I just thought it looked rad, right?” and raise your hand in an effort to receive some skin.
You start thinking to yourself, “Do I really want this evil, top-hatted clown smoking a cigar on my arm?” and then straight after you think, “Of course I fucking do! I've just paid a weekend's wage for two to three hours of what could be considered voluntary torture for a permanent reminder of my unhinged youth.” At that point, if you don't want it, it's too late, my friend. So man up and enjoy every minute of that pretty new picture on your skin for the rest of your life because there's no amount of remorse that's going to get that thing off you. The only real option is laser removal, which can be up to 6 times more pricey, a whole lot more painful and leaves you with an ugly scar where the artwork used to sit. There is obviously little point in having any regret about your tattoos, unless of course you're one of those hundreds of deadshits who come home after a big night up the Cross and wake up with a badly drawn set of brown eyes staring out from each of their arse cheeks. For them, I truly do feel sorry, and if I ever meet one of those unfortunate bastards, I'd probably be that awful, judgemental person saying: “Now what possessed you to get that? Just look what you've done to yourself!”
21ST SEPTEMBER 2011