J was the coolest grown-up at my first job. The place was a magazine publisher that felt like finishing school, lousy with women you could just tell had once owned a horse. If I was an outlier—not white, not born rich, gay sissy not gay gym bunny—so, too, was J, with her blunt haircut, her thrift-store shirts revealing tattooed arms.
I was stunned to learn that J was older than me, as though it had not occurred to me that one could be an adult but remain cool. J had a husband, an artist with a nerdy affect. His skin was covered with tattoos, many he’d doodled on himself. He’d tattoo me, if I wanted? I was a kid, trying to settle on what kind of person I’d be. Maybe here was part of the answer. Also, I thought him almost unbearably sexy. I wanted to be just like him, and just like her. Weeks later, I stood in the kitchen of their apartment while he sketched out what I’d requested—a skull and crossbones, for reasons forgotten, if I ever had any at all. “It’s perfect because someday all you’ll be is a skull and bones,” he said as he ran the needle across my shoulder blade. “This tattoo will last until then.”
I was 22, maybe too old to have so little sense of self, to be so enchanted by the idea that I was now a guy with a tattoo, and maybe too young to know that permanence is only an illusion. When I heard, a couple of years ago, that the handsome artist who did my first tattoo had died, I remembered that moment, the dumb tattoo I’d chosen being interpreted as a cheerful acknowledgment of my death, the one thing in life we know is going to happen to us.
The gag in our family is that this is my crisis, the word we most associate with midlife, or maybe this is a joke I make at my own expense. I long ago got my husband David’s initials inscribed on my arm. Shortly after, beneath that, the name of our first kid. Three years later, another kid and another name. This tidy stack is nothing like that skull and crossbones, insofar as I know just what it means.
But a few years on, firmly in my 40s, I did land on the person I wanted to be, and tattoos seemed one way of making that concrete. Maybe it’s that I finally had the budget (this is an expensive habit), maybe it’s that I had reached détente with the fact of my body, maybe it’s that I had a better grasp of the fact that I would, indeed, someday be just a skull and some bones, or at least understood that no one ever quite understands that. I can never count my tattoos, in part because I can’t see several of them—funny how our bodies contain us but elude our sight. It doesn’t matter, as quantity is not the point. It’s something more private, hard to fit into language—a tricky proposition for someone who has made that his work. I recently saw two old friends on the California beach. There they were: our middle-aged bodies. What, these two beautiful women wanted to know, pointing at my bicep, my shoulder, my arm, did these all mean?
I’m nothing like the cool grown-up I thought I was preparing myself to be when I was 22, getting a tattoo from my friend’s husband. Probably none of us end up being the people we think we’re going to be.
It’s not a secret. I was happy to oblige. This is a chair, designed at mid-century by Marco Zanuso. I had one as a child, imagined it into a mountain, a racetrack, a base for my GI Joes. Now it sits by my desk, and when I’m writing a book, some superstition has me stack the manuscripts there. The toy boat is because when my family was in Paris, my older son—too old for this childish diversion even then—rented one of these vessels to float in a fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens, and was once again the vehicle-crazed toddler I had once known, a satisfied smile on his face.
Really, a lot of the tattoos have to do with my family—several are icons and motifs that make me think of the small town where we’ve spent so many summers. I have on my body reminders of the time we saw thousands of dragonflies swarming on the beach, of the house we rented by the bay that was coated, every evening, in the webs of hundreds of mosquito-mad spiders, of the butterflies so trusting they’ll land on your arm as you walk by, of the horseshoe crabs we find washed up every so often, visitors from some prehistoric time.
All these pictures are the individual artist’s invention, save the grinning whale on my forearm. That’s William Steig’s drawing, the whale the hero of a book I love so much I would get choked up when I read it to the boys before bed. Seems likely I’ll never read that book aloud to them again while trying not to cry. But maybe I can conjure the memory of the solid weight of a sleepy seven-year-old and a fidgety toddler, plastic cup of milk in hand.
Most of us have some instinct to capture these things forever; that’s why we save ticket stubs and outgrown baby clothes, take photographs of every memorable taco, the dog freaking out about the snow. We want to remember. This is a losing battle, and we know it. Maybe if I inscribe this stuff on my very body, it will last however long my body does. Maybe I’ve landed on a workaround.
A couple of years ago, I commissioned an artist to do a tangle of branches and birds on the left side of my back. The tattoos I get, fine-lined, only black, are not especially painful. Most times when I get a tattoo, I fall dead asleep, a shock response that reminds me how in some cultures, this act is a quasi-spiritual rite. But this proved an endurance test. It was winter, and I was shivering shirtless in a vast cold studio, the artist (a big guy) leaning over my body with all his weight. It was supposed to be a single sitting, but after five hours I could no longer bear it. I felt like such a failure, such a disappointment, like I’d fallen short of some stupid toxic idea I can’t help but have about being tough. The artist wrapped my back in plastic and told me that now that he is older, he, too, has trouble sitting for a tattoo for so long.
It seems inevitable that I’ll run out of skin, or interest, but maybe also time; if it’s hard for me to imagine myself at 60 getting a fresh tattoo, that might just be a failure of my imagination. It’s less that I think it unseemly and more that I worry I won’t be able to endure it, just as I can no longer have a third Manhattan at dinner or sleep past 6am—all those little reminders that you are, in fact, ageing. I am tattooed now, yes, but mostly I’m nothing like the cool grown-up I thought I was preparing myself to be when I was 22, getting a tattoo from my friend’s husband. Probably none of us end up being the people we think we’re going to be.
Once, I came back from an appointment (I can’t remember which one) and my younger son studied the new image on my body. “That’s cool, I guess,” he admitted, the praise for which so many parents wait in vain. “Maybe I’ll get that when I get my tattoo.” I was surprised; I asked if he was interested in getting one, when he’s an adult, but it emerged that he was under the impression that he had to, that it was an unavoidable part of adulthood. I laughed privately but corrected this misunderstanding. Being an adult, I told him, means that as long as it’s not illegal or cruel, you can do what you want. You don’t need to have a reason at all.
