Travel & Tattoos

I’ll Try Anything Twice

Getting inked in Indonesia

Some years ago, and for no particular reason, I found myself in Indonesia. I was young, and I felt very much alone until I discovered that by embracing loneliness, my solitude became my superpower. I could be my own chaperone at the far ends of the earth, exploring the world and myself with a freedom I had never thought possible. Freedom I don’t suppose I will ever know again.

Regrettably, I was not alone in Indonesia. I was renting a house with three Canadian women, living out an idyllic scheme the four of us had hatched a month earlier in a grotty traveler’s house in Melbourne. “Let’s live by the beach in Bali!” we said. “We’ll have a pool, and scooters, and our only work will be opening bottles of Bintang and turning over to tan our backs.”

At the age of twenty-seven, my nirvana was still in the hands of the opposite sex. I imagined the sand, and the sea, and the bikinis. I didn’t imagine the boredom.

Hugh Hefner’s heaven was lost on me. After three days of thirty-cent beers on that sunburnt beach, the ecstasy of our endeavour melted into a Groundhog Day torture. I want something else. Anything else. Let’s go scuba diving; let’s learn Mandarin; let’s test out a taser on my nipples and see if I feel alive! Anything but another row of postcard palm trees in this garden variety paradise.

I tried to cure my monotony with long walks. I would hike three hours on the edge of treacherous highways, where sewage ditches serve as sidewalks; where vendors sell gasoline out of plastic Coke bottles; where children stop their football matches to swarm pedestrians and try to pick their pockets.

In the evenings I roamed from bar to bar down the boulevards of Denpasar, drinking with degenerates who understood no English, but who seemed to understand me. They certainly understood more than the women I was living with. Stewed into a stupor, I would flag a taxi, and by some miracle, I would point the driver left and right until I found myself at my front door.

Wake. Rinse. Repeat. Every day another dreary duplicate, until I happened upon a bar called Twice.

Bali was a segregated island. The bars near the tourist strip along Kuta beach were free for foreigners, but they charged Indonesians an admission fee. The goal was to ensure that the wealthy holiday-goers would never be forced to speak with a local when they took their ‘expeditions’ beyond the confines of their five-star-fences, ostensibly to absorb the local culture.

Twice bucked the trend, promising no admission fees, no matter your skin colour. There was a rumor among the tourists that the bar wasn’t safe. In truth, the bar simply wasn’t white. It was not fancy — Twice’s most popular Google review is entitled ‘Toilet Needs Improvement’ — but fancy is often fussy, and I was in no mood for a fuss.

The bar was in fine form. An Indonesian punk band — four Balinese teenagers in ripped jeans and Sex Pistols t-shirts — made their instruments scream as patrons convulsed before them, spilling Arak across the sticky dance floor.

Arak is a powerful, unregulated Balinese liquor made from aniseed. Bad batches occasionally make imbibers go blind, but nobody at Twice had lost their sight that night. I ordered an Arak, and I drank.

I was somewhere in the felicity of my third Arak when he walked in. I suppose his skin looked like mine, if you ignore the gallon of ink. He was a tattoo fanatic, a man running out of skin space on which to ride his hobby horse. He spotted me and sidled up, correctly assuming that a common tongue was the only necessity for a temporary best friend.

“I’ll have one of those,” he said, pointing at my cloudy Arak, his voice revealing his Australian. I warned him that my drink tasted profoundly awful, but he was only more encouraged. Somewhere in the haze of the next hour, he made his proposal.

“We’re getting a tattoo tonight mate.”

“I’m not getting a tattoo,” I said. I had a tattoo — a silly little something on my shoulder — and I wanted it to be my first and last.

“Nah we’re getting a tattoo.”

“How about you get a tattoo, and I’ll watch.”

“I’m a tattoo artist.”

That last bit wasn’t the inked Australian. It was the bartender.

He was a teenager, not old enough to drink where I’m from, but I wasn’t where I’m from, so this child was squeezing limes into my moonshine. Now he was pulling out his kit bag, a pack full of bottled inks and electric needles, an extension cord, and a hand towel stained pink with old blood.

No is a difficult word for a drunk. You don’t find yourself sauced on the other side of the world, in the company of teenage Balinese anarchists and a strange Australian stigmatophile, when ‘I don’t think so’ rolls off your tongue.

I don’t remember relenting. My next memory has my shiny alabaster foot on the bar, and the juvenile mixologist etching an X into my ankle bone, as the ankle was the only empty patch of skin on my new Australian best friend’s body. I don’t remember any pain, but in that state the boy could have chopped my foot off with a machete and my only cry would have been to ask for another Arak.

Pie-eyed and raw, the Australian and I wandered back to the tourist bars. With our syllables slurring and our ankles bleeding, we were universally refused service.

Then I wake up. Alone again. Back in a house full of boring Canadian girls. I looked down at my right foot, and I had only one thought.

This is permanent.

Forevermore I shall have evidence of my idiocy inscribed on my body. I spent the day scraping my ankle through the sand, hoping to smudge my foot’s new forever abomination. For anyone regretting a tattoo, let me tell you: you can’t rub it off the next morning. All you can do is give yourself an infection.

I must have expressed my remorse to the Australian, because later that day I found a note in my pants pocket.

“Don’t worry,” the note said. “Nothing is permanent if you really think about it.”

No name. No contact information.

I have a tattoo of an X and a 2 in different fonts — was that supposed to mean ‘Twice’? — on my ankle, and somewhere in this wide world there is an Australian man who matches me. We are lost to each other now, but wherever he is, I’m sure he is forced to tell the same story every time he wears sandals.

I felt like a fool, but there was a silver lining. For the rest of my sojourn in Indonesia, I was grateful for every boring day at the beach.

For a little slice of India, click here:

For an analysis of Canadian niceness, check out Ellen Eastwood: