Well There Goes a Perfectly Good Stereotype

I am too old for the tattoo craze. 

I can remember exactly zero people in my high school that had visible tattoos, and exactly one guy from college. And he doesn't really count because he was in a heavy metal band, so the ink had as much to do with his stage persona as it did his day to day life. Assuming Seattle (not to mention Barcelona, Sevilla, Hanoi, and most everywhere else I've been in the past few years) is any indication, things have changed. 

Until now, I wasn't really affected. There were three basic problems that kept me from being interested in acquiring a tattoo. 

First, I could see no real reason to willingly sign up for having needles jabbed in my arm. Who needs extra pain?

Second, I've reached the age where I realize nothing is permanent, including my own affections and affiliations. As I look back across my life, I can easily identify the things that I might have been interested in having tattooed on my body at any given point in time. The problem is, I can also recognize that about two or three years after that point whatever it was that I thought was "eternal," and therefore worth having permanently attached to me, was now of approximately zero importance.  

And third, I just don't trust the assumption that anything written on my skin would age well. I figure I'd be the guy who gets a Rita Hayworth tattoo in his twenties, only to have her turn into Shelley Winters by the time he retires (and, yes, I did grow up watching a lot of old movies).

But here's the thing. Cancer changes all of those equations. 

Pain? If you can live through the post-surgical pain of a hemicolectomy, you can live through being jabbed with a needle a few thousand times. 

Permanent affiliations and aging skin? Well, not to put too fine a point on it, but a) the cancer's not going away, so that's going to be a fairly permanent condition, and b) it's highly likely that any interests I have that are significant enough to generate a tattoo will outlast me. 

All of which is to say, cancer has eliminated all of my personal barriers to getting a tattoo. And wandering around Spain generated an idea for exactly the tattoo I need, and in my downtime I identified who, I think, needs to apply it.

Today I called for an appointment and learned her first availability is in January.

What happened to the stereotype of getting drunk, losing your impulse control, and winding up with ink? This is about as far from impulsive shopping as you can get. 

We'll see if my interest lasts until January.