Tattoo Birthday

What happened when my 14-year-old asked for a permanent tattoo

My daughter was 14 when she first asked to get a tattoo. I’d say “only 14,” but ever since my little girl was a toddler, even as young as 2, when she already had the mental capacity to discuss where I would nurse her — -“boobie bed or boobie couch?” — I saw her as a much wiser being.

It seems she was grown up from the moment she climbed her way out of my body because she couldn’t deal with the darkness or confinement, or the awful mess of blood and fluids created by the birthing experience, for one more minute. Twenty-four hours was enough to put both of us in a bad mood. And Julia, also known as Juicy, still avoids the dark.

But first a little about me. By 14, I had already lost my virginity, smoked my first joint and ripped up many small stages as the singer in my first band led by my guitar-playing beau, who liked to pick me up from school (my last year of elementary) on his motorbike. Maybe that’s partly why Julia’s courageous soul chose me as her Earthly tour guide.

Like mother, like daughter. Julia is a singer who has already fronted a few bands. When I’ve gone to her gigs and stand at the foot of her stage, I flash back whether I like it or not. But not just back to my days as a young rock-n’-roll wannabe, but also on her first moments of life, with total recall and additional insight regarding the nuances of the experience.

It was first thing in the morning, Dec. 26, the day after the Christmas of a very snowy year during a blizzard that my dark-haired daughter was born. I’d been there since early the previous day. During the 24 hours of delivery, I imagined her weighing the pros and cons of me as her mother. How else could I explain that moment of terror, when she could have rejected her life with me at the last minute by choking to death on her own excrement?

Meconium was discovered by the nurse who checked on me in the bathroom attached to my birthing room. After refusing an epidural just as I had when my son was being born less than two years prior, I sat hunched over in the shower chair. Scalding hot water poured down my front, drowning the pain of contractions, while something mysteriously darkened the puddle under my bottom. Blood? I figured that was normal. Little did I know this could have been Julia’s chance to exit stage right to avoid being mothered by a being so similar that we might cancel each other out. A group of resident doctors were brought in to observe the heroic acts of my doctor.

This is how you remove the meconium, the earliest stool of a mammalian infant, which doesn’t happen very often.

Sometime around age 7, Juicy looked up at me with big blue saucer eyes after studying her half-sister’s well-inked skin. She said, “I’d be too scared to get a tattoo.”

I wanted to believe that like me, she would like the idea of being tattooed, then forget about it for a few decades. Maybe the expression “you don’t put a bumper sticker on a Ferrari” would resonate with her like it did with me, when at 18, I’d watched other people treat themselves like old pick-up trucks.

Everything changes. When she was tall enough to kiss my cheek without straining her neck or standing on her toes, she would recognize her ideas about how she wanted to look as a force much mightier than her fear. Nothing would stop her. I flashed forward to the possibility of her marching in the house one day, branded with a rose, an anchor, a butterfly, a skull or some other permanent and significantly insignificant emblem of youth. I prayed she’d have better sense.

By the time she hit me with the third (or was it the 10th?) plea, I offered a plan to ensure that I would take part in the event to avoid an uncomfortable surprise, while also putting it off for another two years. I said, “How about when you turn 16 and I turn 50, we’ll both get tattoos?”

My broad smile was meant to camouflage the lie. Two years was such a long way off that it may never come. Flaming meteors might crash into the earth to squash us all like bugs. Or there could be nuclear war. Or just maybe, I was already living on borrowed time and she would end up celebrating our birthdays without me and get that tattoo knowing it’s what I would have wanted. I also imagined her arguing with her dad that she’d have to get two tattoos, one for her and one for me since I’d never have the chance.

Back to reality. As the plan escaped my lips I didn’t know that I had tempted the mind-bending warp of time. Our birthdays are two weeks apart. Those two years spent wondering why I’d made such a crazy promise would mimic the speed of light, flying by much faster than I could settle the debate of what symbol would be worthy of forevermore.

Where the heck would I put it? Shouldn’t it be where I could admire it? If nothing else, it would have to serve as a reminder of a fleeting moment in time and my special bond with my daughter. And what good was that if I’d need a mirror to see it? I told my mother, the artist and art critic, about my pact with her middle grandchild. When her silence betrayed her trouble with the concept of permanence, I tried to ease the blow by saying, If I’m going to have a piece of art on my body forever, you should be the one to create it, not some stranger. She was flattered, but still stunned. That’s probably why we’d never speak about it again, along with the fact that neither one of us truly believed the time would come. I wondered, couldn’t I simply change my mind? It was October and I was still thinking I might get out of it somehow, while Julia took her time studying websites of famous tattoo artists before choosing an image. I thought maybe she wouldn’t care at all whether I got one or didn’t get one. She might even feign disappointment. As long as she got hers, she wouldn’t care what I did. I could say I couldn’t afford for us both to get one. But…we had a pact. If I crapped out, she would always remember me as a coward, a welcher.

In late November, it became clear that my fear by its own virtue could not save me. So, I forced myself to think about the logistics. There were only two symbols worthy of foreverness: An Om symbol and/or a lotus flower. Both would memorialize my time as a yoga musician, when I called myself Yoji Ananda, and wrote, sang and recorded devotional music with Sanskrit mantras, and performed them during yoga classes.

50 is the new 30, or so I’ve been told. While it can be drawn to look like the number 30, Om is the symbol for the sound of the higher power. The tattoo artist drew his concept of it on a piece of tracing paper. I couldn’t believe I had waited until five minutes before it was time to sit in the chair to make this huge decision. And that’s when it came to me. My guitar-strumming arm up in the spot just below my elbow would be most visible and less painful than other spots I might choose. It felt right.

Julia’s sense of calm made me ready to go. No fear! It was her actual birthday, but I still had two weeks to be a 49er. There was a lot of pressure on this moment to help me greet the dreaded 50 with a sense of bravery and commitment to being the best version of me I’d ever been. Surely, she’d want me to go first and give me the chance to lead the way.

Nope. She said she would be too nervous to have to wait. Or maybe she was afraid that if I went first that I wouldn’t want this bad man to hurt my precious girl, the one who insisted on having her ears pierced at age 5. During the puncture of her first ear, she screamed so loudly that a complete stranger gave her a dollar to stop flailing and crying long enough to get the second one done. The memory of the sudden iron will of that small but mighty person clad in a Taekwondo uniform putting on a brave face for strangers haunts me still. Yet, here she was, prepared to undergo an unquantifiable torture in the name of fashion and self-expression.

She got comfortable in the reclining chair as the artist prepared his tools for the job and my mind exploded with a combination of disbelief, uncertainty, excitement, complete resolve, utter conflict, fear of pain, fear of the unknown, speeding trains, and crashing cars. None of it made sense, so all I could do was think of the millions of other people in the world with inked skin, some even younger than my Julia. The owner of my favorite Indian restaurant said getting his Om tattoo at 7 was a common rite of passage.

Then there was my step-daughter, Julia’s much older half-sister, a tattoo role model for us both if only because she’s close to running out of dermal real estate. At her professional behest, we stopped at the pharmacy for a bag of Blow Pops to distract us from the discomfort, dare she call it pain. But Julia wasn’t afraid either of the potential pain or of pointing out how her legs and hands were steadily shaking from an excitement she had never known. “You don’t have to do this, you know,” I said. And she flashed a look of disappointment, as if that was the wrong thing to say. Quickly, I covered up with, “If it was that bad, no one would do it.” Then I said to the artist, “Be honest. How badly is it going to hurt? Clearly, Julia isn’t worried about it, but I am.”

“It really depends on your pain tolerance,” he said to Julia, assuming she was more afraid than she let on. “Eat your Blow Pop, talk to your mother, and ignore me.” As he began his handiwork with one quick stroke as an intro to the next 45 minutes, she winced, then relaxed when he said, “That’s as bad as it’ll get. Can you handle it?”

“Yeah, it’s fine,” she said, smiling at me. And all too soon, the top of her left thigh was decorated by the rather large image of the cloaked Grim Reaper holding a girl with a face that looks just like my girl’s. No color, just thick black lines resembling a charcoal drawing on a flesh-toned canvas.

I was taken aback by the boldness of it and how it aged her about five years, maybe more. Had I done a bad thing? Would this birthday present lead to some eventual ruin? Would she regret it later and have to cover it up? Or undergo laser surgery to remove it completely, and the memory along with it?

When it was my turn, all I could do to quiet the mocking voice of my Inner Bitch was to ask if she liked it, if it still hurt or if it felt like a wound. Not just her mouth, but her soul smiled at me as she said, “Thank you, Mama.” We hugged and I shivered a little in light of her precious gratitude.

“OK, tell me the truth,” I said. “Do you think I can handle it?”

There was a sort of drum roll in my gut as I depended on her answer as my last-minute words of wisdom, right before she delivered the punchline.

“It’s tolerable,” she said. “But honestly, if I ever have a daughter, I wouldn’t let her get a tattoo until she was at least 18.”