My tattoo has been healed for three and a half months. The lines have settled, the itch has subsided and I still havent told my mother.
Its not that I think shell react badly, necessarily. But telling the more conservative members of my family feels like taking a risk, and if theres one thing Ive become good at over the years, its avoiding risky situations until it becomes unsustainable to avoid them further. If a 30-year-old woman admitting that shes scared of her moms reaction to a tattoo seems absurd to you, know that its equally absurd to me. But (very) old habits die (very) hard.
I am an adult, or so the numbers would suggest, and adults make reasonably permanent decisions about their lives and bodies all the time including, increasingly, getting tattooed. In 2015, the Pew Center reported that 40 per cent of millennials they surveyed had one already, a figure that has no doubt gotten higher since then.
Thus, Ive spent an increasing amount of time perusing the decorated forearms of friends, colleagues and strangers with what I eventually realized was jealousy not necessarily of the work itself, but of the sense of control and autonomy the tattooed person in question must feel. How do they know they wont hate that in five or 10 or 20 years? Wont people disapprove? How do you learn to not care about that? Does everyone else just go around trusting their own judgment all the time?
To my anxious mind, getting tattoos always seemed to be a thing that other people could do, but not me which only intensified my lifelong fascination. (Ive been spitballing design possibilities since high school. Im glad Teen Me didnt get that goofy guitar/dragonfly doodle from the liner notes of the Barenaked Ladies keyboardists solo album, though I give her points for her unusual taste in CanCon.)
Two years ago, I cracked open the horoscope column on LGBTQ+ blog Autostraddle, scrolled to Cancer and arrived at a black-and-white line drawing of a crab claw. It was craggy and curved, organic but sharp. Damn, that would make a sweet tattoo, my brain said, as it had said previously about many, many things.
I waved the idea off. Zodiac references seemed a little close to the maple leaves and tribal armbands segment of the tattoo fromage continuum. But the concept hung around in the back of my brain, seeming to dovetail thematically with a period of intense personal growth.
Around that time, I was exploring various types of therapy, and had recently summoned the nerve to leave a toxic relationship. In the process, I was getting to know and like myself in a way I previously hadnt learning to trust my intuition, reckoning with my sensitive nature and self-protective instincts as assets and not just liabilities, accepting both vulnerability and toughness as tools that lay within my grasp. It seemed like a half-decent metaphor to me.
Plus, my 30th birthday was approaching, and doesnt 30 sound like a reasonable age to get your first tattoo? (You can, of course, get tattoos whenever, but one of the central tenets of overthinking is to come up with as many iron-clad justifications for your normal, quotidian desires as possible.)
So I walked into Pearl Harbor Gift Shop and plunked down a deposit. But not before you guessed it an extensive period of nervous dithering.
I googled every possible variation of How do you know you wont hate your tattoos? I pored over my copy of cartoonist Kate Leths zine Ink For Beginners, which Id bought years before and socked away. Reference images were screenshot and attached to drafts of emails to artists that went unsent. On vacation in Amsterdam, I even dropped in on walk-in day at a shop Id been following obsessively on Instagram but chickened out and just bought a T-shirt instead.
Somehow, I allowed the big day to arrive without cancelling my appointment. My boyfriend and I finished brunch at White Lily (I left half of my food untouched a lifetime first) and began our streetcar ride to the shop. I tried to keep up a conversation but couldnt focus on anything but the knot in my stomach and the sound of blood pumping through my ears.
What would help? I asked myself, and an answer arrived. I rooted through my bag and unearthed my Kate Leth tattoo zine and a Sharpie. Turning to the back page, I scrawled:
I, NATALIA MANZOCCO, give NATALIA MANZOCCO official and irrevocable permission to get a tattoo, dated this year of our Lord, June 23, 2017.
Then I signed it. So did Will, under witness.
At the shop, I answered the artists questions about proportion and placement in a full, if surprisingly coherent, panic.
You have permission, I repeated to myself, and it loosened the stomach knot by a fingernails width. You have permission.
Eventually, I got on the table, the scrape of the needle began, and 15 years of will-I-or-wont-I ended in 15 astonishingly brief, wince- and expletive-filled minutes. Wow, I mused to myself between elaborate cuss words, I thought for sure Id have punked out by now.
They bandaged me up and gave me aftercare instructions, and I rode out of there on a wave of relief and pride punctuated with the obligatory soupcon of what the holy hell did I just do?
About half an hour after I left the shop, there was also a brief interlude of panic over whether I had technically positioned the claw upside-down, and whether that should be cause for a lifetime of regret or not.
The anxious inner monologue, of course, survived my date with the tattoo gun. But the real surprise since then has been the arrival of something new, cutting through the internal clamour. Now, when I start worrying, procrastinating or obsessing, something inside me remembers that Ive got a tiny little weapon inked on my arm and says, Nu-uh, kid. Get in there and fight.
Not long ago, I was waiting in line behind a woman with a faded tattoo of a turtle that had once been rendered in candy-bright pastels. It was above her elbow, in precisely the same spot as mine. Even as I wondered if she regretted getting it, I felt that familiar sense of envy creep in. Not because I wanted to look like I listened to a lot of Sublime in the 90s. But because it seemed like there could be no better sign of a life well lived than an old tattoo.
Thirty years down the line, I may come to loathe this little claw. But if thats how the future shakes out, I have faith that 60-year-old me will either be wise enough to appreciate how far Ill have come since I was 30, or compassionate enough to look back on that person, remember her struggles and priorities and dreams, and think of her with kindness and warmth.
Im excited to meet Future Me. I bet shell have some rad tattoos.
Don’t miss the rest of our tattoo issue:
Toronto stick and poke artists hit the mainstream
Toronto tattoo shops you need to know
Getting a tattoo as a black person shouldn’t be this hard
nataliam@nowtoronto.com | @nataliamanzocco
