I Have A Full Sleeve Tattoo on My Arm But You Can’t See it
I don’t mean I won’t let you see it, it vanished
I’ve made many poor decisions in my life. Some of them have had long term repercussions like getting married or trying heroin. Other decisions became amusing anecdotes. Like my decision to get my first tattoo.
Wanna see it?
Pretty cool isn’t it?
“What’s cool? There’s nothing there. You didn’t get a tattoo.”
Unfortunately I did. A year earlier my arm looked like this.
And here’s what it was supposed to look like.
Why I had no tattoos
- Being Jewish. My grandma had a tattoo. It was numbers on her wrist. The Nazis gave it to her during WWII. That was 80 years ago. Both my sister and I waited until she was gone before even thinking about getting one.
- I could never decide on what to get on my body that I would like to have there for the rest of my life. Tattooing is an art form now, but when I turned 18 it was mostly an outlaw thing vs art. I know an older dude with a Ziggy tattoo who is so sick of explaining who Ziggy was and why.
- Kissing a lot of jobs goodbye. I was a lifeguard in my 20’s. I would have never been hired with tattoos.
The story happened seven years ago and involves my roommate Sheena.
Sheena bought her first tattoo gun and was itching to try it out. She offered free tattoos to all of our friends. Our pierced and tatted friends responded with silence.
We were both off work and didn’t have anything going on the rest of the afternoon. She decided to give herself a tattoo on her thigh because she had no one else to tattoo.
I half-jokingly told Sheena that I wanted a full sleeve done in UV ink. Guess who had just purchased a brand new bottle of UV ink? Before I could say no she had her gun set up. This was happening.
I’d made it to 35 without getting a single tattoo. My friends were all tatted and pierced with chest pieces and their neck blown out. I was the unusual one with zero tattoos.
The tattoo took 4 hours. I always wondered how painful getting a tattoo was. I’d heard and seen various reports. Getting my entire arm tattooed gave me the answer. Totally depends on where you’re getting tattooed. My forearm was cake. My wrist was terribly painful. The crook of my arm was almost unbearable.
I gave her a quarter of weed for her efforts. She offered to finish it but what she had done looked a bit shit. But I didn’t really care because after a month unless I was under a black light there was nothing to see.
She offered to fill it in and do more detail but I said I was good. In her defense it was the second tattoo she ever did. She’s much better at it now but she doesn’t have the time since she started a successful cosmetics company.
It worked under UV light for a year. It looked cool at Disneyland and goth clubs. Then it was scarring for 3 years where you could barely see the ink under black light.
If you look today I couldn’t show you evidence that I ever had a tattoo. Which was a good thing in this case. I didn’t need a cover up. It disappeared.
Now let’s never speak of this again.