I don’t consider most of my tattoos to be any sort of deep, meaningful symbol of my beliefs or whatnot, but maybe that fact in and of itself says a lot about me. They all designate something that was important to me in some way at the time or at least signify something I was living or doing at the time. Some of them are choices I made because I wanted a tattoo and the ‘art’ of it just made me go “Oooh, THAT looks fun!” so I did it (much like the murals I have painted on my walls… but that’s another story).
My first tattoo was gotten at 18 (that's 28 years ago if you're counting). I was in a shitty, awful long term relationship with a guy (boy) who was raised to be entitled and cocky. I met him at a local concert (he was playing guitar in a band) and I was walking by because I was actually avoiding going into the bar where the guy I WANTED to see was working. In hindsight, it was an even bigger mistake than I could have possibly imagined, but at the time I was just trying to avoid having my heart broken by the love-of-my-life soulmate that I knew had the power to crush me.
"Bar Guy" might seem irrelevant, but if you stick with the next part of the story, you'll see that he appears again later in my story and plays a rather significant role. Anyway, I guess I felt safer with “New Guy," because he would never have that kind of power over me… so I instead waded into a relationship with someone that I shouldn’t have even spoken to in the first place.
This guy was NOT in a space for a relationship. Not with anyone, but especially not with volatile, emotionally damaged me. He was emotionally abusive at best, and definitely the wrong person for me at the time. At any time, of course. Still, he was my relationship and a part of my daily life, for better or worse. It probably says a lot that I was on anti-depressants, then committed myself to a mental hospital for fear of my suicidal thoughts and soon slid into drinking myself silly most of the time during our short, and yet far too ‘long-term’ relationship.
Why I decided to get a tattoo at all, I can’t tell you. I made a design that I purposefully designed to be somewhat… confusing. Like one of those picture puzzles with lots of designs that you have to find the hidden word or whatever. I did that because I put that boyfriend’s name in the tattoo, and some part of me knew, even before getting inked, that I would want to be able to easily mark his name out at some point. I think I even had another word in there too, but it was such a poorly done tattoo that it’s all indecipherable now and you can’t see anything in it.
I think it also says a lot that said boyfriend was furious with me for getting his name in a tattoo. He seemed to think it meant we were committed or something, even though he then was annoyed again when I told him that I’d designed it to be covered up later.
Ahhhh… the stupidity and cockiness of youth. Anyway, this was my first tattoo. I carried the design around with me and walked/stumbled to a tattoo parlor on the way home from the bar one night with a friend. That was my first tattoo.
Maybe I’d regret this tattoo more if it wasn’t the least of my mistakes at that point in my life! As it is I suppose if nothing else than a good reminder of those days that I didn’t listen to my heart or my intuition and I let myself stay in bad situations because I was too afraid to get myself out of them.
And that is the story of my first tattoo (out of what is now nine of them).
This is my "Part Two" if you're interested.