by Jancee Dunn
A girl! I secretly wanted a girl. I felt a flood of tenderness for the little fetus. Look at how lively she was, leaping around like a tiny Mexican jumping bean! Suddenly it all became real. She was real.
“Would you like me to print out some of the sonogram photos?”
“Yes,” I said jubilantly. “Would you mind getting me the one of her profile? She has Tom’s nose.”
I hurried home with my sonogram photos, and when I told Tom we were having a daughter, he hugged me tightly. “Now I have two girls to love,” he said.
I called Julie and excitedly told her the news. “I knew it,” she said. “I knew it was going to be a girl. Isn’t it funny that we both will have one daughter? Another thing we have in common! I just thought of something. Let me call you right back.”
Five minutes later, she phoned me. “I talked to my mother,” she said. “I’ve been saving all of Violet’s clothes at her house and she’s going to bring them to my place. Originally I was going to give them to my brother, but for some reason he never got them. It’s fate. It’s fate!” A week later, she invited me to come over to her apartment to “pick up a few things.” When I got there, she was waiting in the lobby with a luggage trolley she had commandeered from the superintendent. Piled on the trolley were eight bulging contractor bags stuffed full of maternity clothes, baby outfits, and toddler clothes. “You’re all set,” Julie announced triumphantly.
Back at my apartment, after I spent an entire weekend sorting through the colorful mountain of clothes, I remembered to mail my folks a copy of our sonogram photos.
“I’m not sending these things to anyone but our parents,” I told Tom, putting a stamp on the envelope. “But I think they’ll get a kick out of them.”
Indeed they did, and when I went to visit my parents a few weeks later, they proudly led me to the living room. “Come see what we did,” said my mother. She pointed to our trove of family pictures displayed on a table. Nestled among them was a framed photo of one of the sonogram pictures, a profile shot of the baby’s head.
“She fits right in,” noted my father. Admittedly, her face looked a little eerie next to the faces of the family members who had actual skin, but I was still touched.
I’m Gettin’ a Tattoo
Last Thanksgiving, right about the time that our family had finished scraping up the remainder of our triple fleet of pies (pecan, chocolate, and pumpkin), my mother pushed away from the table, dabbed her lips with a napkin, and calmly made an announcement.
“I’m gettin’ a tattoo,” she said.
All of us froze. Most even stopped chewing, a testament to the gravity of the situation.
She looked around, defiant. “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I’m doing it, and that’s that.”
Our dining table, strewn with artificial pumpkins and votive candles in harvest colors, suddenly transformed into a hushed, packed courtroom. Nobody spoke.
I cleared my throat. “Mom,” I said finally. “Mom. You’re not a kid. You’re__. (Note: I have been requested not to reveal the exact number, as she looks considerably more youthful than her calendar age and would prefer to “let people wonder.”)
Dinah’s fork hovered motionless over the last scrap of her chocolate pie. “What do you plan to get, exactly?” she asked in a faint voice.
My mother drew herself up, relishing the moment. “I’ve decided to get a raven.”
“Why?” Dinah still hadn’t resumed eating. I had already polished off my chocolate pie and wondered if I could finish hers, provided that she cut away the parts her fork had touched.
My mother shrugged. “I don’t know why. I’ve always liked ravens. Maybe that’s my totem or something, I don’t know. They just appeal to me.”
“I think I need to be fanned,” I heard Heather mutter to her husband, Rob. Then she asked my mother where she planned to have this tattoo inscribed.
“On my wrist,” she replied, waving her left hand over what I felt was a very large area of her right wrist.
Dinah tried again. “Is this some sort of midlife thing?”
My mother laughed. “I’ve passed midlife. Am I having a later-in-life crisis? No. I just think it’s going to make me happy.”
Then I stepped in. “You’ll get tired of looking at it, believe me. Don’t you get sick of your clothes, your jewelry? You go out and buy new ones and give the old ones to Goodwill. Well, you can’t do that with tattoos. Simon Doonan once called them ‘permanent bell-bottoms.’”
At the same moment, we all arrived at the collective realization that my father had not yet said a word. Every head snapped to where he sat at the long table opposite Mom. His resigned expression made it clear that they had already chewed the issue over.
Heather frowned. “Dad? You have nothing to say?”
He sighed and put down his fork. “Well,” he began finally. “I wish she wouldn’t do it, because it’s not easy to reverse those things. Your mother is a beautiful woman. Why be a human billboard?”
My dad shook his head. “But you know your mother. The more you protest, the more determined she is to do it. When I object heavily to something, she’ll get her back up. I gave her my opinion, and either she takes it or she doesn’t. I respect her decision if that’s what she wants to do, but I don’t agree with it. Styles come and go. What’s it going to look like when she’s all wrinkled up? You’re not going to be able to tell what the hell it is. I don’t know, a butterfly on the wrist?”
“Didn’t you hear her?” said Heather. “She wants a raven.”
My dad grunted. “Hm. Even worse. A black raven? That’s kind of dark, isn’t it? It will just look like a liver spot gone wild.”
My mom laughed merrily. “It’s my body,” she said. “I do not understand why everyone is getting so upset.”
I raised my eyebrows and informed her that had I floated the idea of a tattoo for myself ten years ago, she would not have approved.
She nodded. “That’s true. I think ten years ago you would have been too young to decide something that was permanent. At my age, I’m certainly more aware that this is something I want for the rest of my life.” My mother’s little announcement would have been considerably less jarring if I had the sort of parents some of my friends had, ones who smoked pot with their kids or strolled around the house nude or passed on their treasured collection of Hendrix records. But my folks had always been unapologetically square.
I tried for levity. “If you’re going to be radical, why not go all the way? Get a tattoo that fools the eye. How about a port-wine stain? Or give yourself a chin cleft.”
“Why not lengthen your butt crack halfway up your back?” said Heather. “That would freak out everyone in your garden club.”
Tom cleared his throat. “Some senior citizens have gotten tattoos saying ‘Do not resuscitate,’” he pointed out. “Just an option.”
The laughter faded and we stared at our plates while my mother dug with gusto into the remainder of her pie. I could tell she was feeling pretty satisfied with herself. Rob, who has age-appropriate tribal tattoos of his own, jumped up to bring out more decaf coffee and to remove himself from the awkwardness. We all watched him intently as he poured it into our mugs. “Well,” I said at length. “If you’re going to go through with it, will you at least allow me to choose the place you go to? I have friends who have gotten tattoos, and I don’t want you going to some fly-by-night joint.”
“Sure,” said my mom, nodding. “Sure.”
“In fact,” I went on, “a crony of mine just wrote an article on the best tattoo artists in New York City. They’re the ones who work on various celebrities. They don’t come cheap, but then again, I suppose this is a pretty important decision.”
Dinah and Heather looked at me, their eyes widening with incredulity and then narrowing. I knew I’d hear about it later.
The moment arrived after dinner, as I settled into my parents’ guest room wearing a pair of my mother’s pale yellow Liz Claiborne
sweats. Tom was downstairs playing video soccer with Rob, and I was gearing up to flip through a pile of my mother’s Southern Living magazines. I could not get enough of their demented recipes, my favorite so far being a turtle trifle, which involves cutting a pecan pie into cubes and layering it in a trifle dish with mascarpone cheese, fudge sauce, caramel sauce, and more pecans. That’s it. (I laugh, but would I eat it? Oh yes.)
And it seemed to be an editorial mandate that each issue contain some variation of a recipe for corn bread—corn-bread crêpes, open-faced shrimp corn-bread sandwiches. Ah. Here we go: corn-bread croutons. Hm, I thought absently. I might eat that. A little heavy, sure, but—
A loud knock interrupted my thoughts, and Dinah and Heather burst in without an invitation. They both took a seat on the bed.
I looked at them. “Did you notice we’re all wearing Liz Claiborne sweats? What, did Mom just pass them out to everyone? They have a weird way of making us look shorter, don’t you think?”
They wouldn’t be distracted. Heather got right into it. “You know what, Jancee? I think you’re an enabler.”
“You are,” Dinah put in. “You made the whole process seem fun, like, ‘Let’s go to New York City and have a crazy day in the East Village, getting a tattoo.’”
“Whoa,” I said. “Why are you people turning on me? I think this is a horrible idea, too.”
“You know why?” said Dinah. “If we hadn’t started screaming, this might have gone away. If you hadn’t turned it into this grand adventure where you take her to New York, then she wouldn’t do it. It’s all about attention. I know Claire’s only five, but I’ve already thought about this: When she comes to tell me she’s going to pierce her nose, I’m not even going to look up from my book.”
Heather smirked. “I hate to tell you, Dinah, but if she’s going to pierce her nose, all she needs is a bathroom, rubbing alcohol, and an earring.”
Dinah ignored her and kept her eyes trained on me. “And of course you’re excited about this announcement because you’re going to write about it. I mean, come on. We’re not dumb.”
I acknowledged that for a writer always on the hunt for material, this was a gift sent straight from heaven on a fluffy pink cloud.
Dinah shook her head. “You know what this is? It’s clichéd rebellion,” she said. “I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to think this way about Mom. It’s rare that I don’t think the things she does are pretty great. Usually she’s so sure of herself, and I don’t know, this one I don’t understand.”
Heather flopped back grumpily onto my pillows. “The tattoo will clash with her radish pin.” My mother had a few garden-themed pins shaped like vegetables. “I’m just not amused. It’s silly. If she gets a tattoo, I don’t even want to look at it. This doesn’t deserve any more talk.” She folded her arms. “Case closed.”
Yet we continued to chew it over. Traditionally after holiday gatherings, one of our bedrooms becomes a post-dinner salon where the night’s events are dissected. Before my mother made her announcement, the scandale de la nuit was shaping up to be my father’s weird show of temper at dinner when my mother mentioned that she wanted to update the family photos in the dining room. He preferred for them to stay forever frozen in the Carter era, when my mother sported a frizzy perm à la Barbra Streisand’s in the remake of A Star Is Born (“the best your mother ever looked,” my father would claim to stunned silence). When my father banged his hand on the table and bellowed that the photos weren’t changing, we sisters primed for a juvenile late-night “What the hell is up with Dad and his freaky outburst” discussion. At least an hour could have been wrung from it, from speculation on the general state of our parents’ marriage to crafting a plan to tell Mom to inform Dad not to flip out at the dinner table.
But our mother’s harebrained scheme had bumped every other issue off the agenda. “Why does this make me so uncomfortable?” I asked my sisters. “It must be her age.”
Dinah shook her head. “It’s not that I think older women shouldn’t get tattoos. I just don’t think it fits Mom. It’s the same reason I don’t want one for myself. It’s a personality issue.”
“I agree,” I said. “She’s not the sort of mom that Cher played in Mask, when she rode around on the back of a motorcycle. She’s a different type.”
“Eventually, her skin will be sagging,” said Heather. “And so will the crow.”
“It’s a raven,” I said.
“Whatever. I just don’t want to see her lying in a coffin with a crow tattoo on her wrist.”
“It’s a raven.”
“Whatever. Mom is a confident, beautiful—”
“Smart person,” put in Dinah.
“And this is like her wearing—”
“Hot pants,” finished Dinah.
We sat quietly. “Here’s an idea,” I said. “What if we had her get it in a place that’s more discreet than her wrist?”
“She’s not going to get it,” Heather declared. “She isn’t. What’s the fun of getting it if your daughters won’t go with you? Because guess what, I’m not going with her. I’m not.”
“What if we encouraged her to do it on her ankle?” I said.
“No!” said Heather, her mouth a firm line. “It’s still there. She’s walking around in the backyard picking hydrangeas to put in a vase, and she’s got this dark splotch on her leg.”
Dinah nodded. “If it was something for her that was private, that’s a whole different thing. Tell her that we’d be much happier if she got it in a place where we couldn’t see it.”
“Ever,” said Heather.
But when I approached my mother in the kitchen the next morning and floated the idea of an ankle tattoo, the woman wouldn’t budge. “I want to be able to see it, like a wristwatch,” she said, sticking a leftover Pillsbury crescent roll into the toaster oven and taking a container of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! spray out of the fridge. I told her she would contract hepatitis. She placidly sprayed the crescent roll without acknowledging me.
Defeated, I went back to my apartment and plunged like a private detective into researching the seamy world of tattoos. I learned that over a third of Americans between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five now had a tattoo. Perhaps getting inked wasn’t so seamy after all; a store called Tattoo Nation opened in 2006 at the Woodbridge Center mall in New Jersey (the first of what the owners planned to be an eventual four hundred stores nationwide).
I reckoned that if my mother was going to go through with this loony decision, she might as well get the best artist available. I consulted my friend’s article, “The City’s Top Inkers.” The horror and Goth specialist beloved by bands like Slayer and Pantera might not be quite right, but I did find one who had given Rosie O’Donnell a tat. That would excite my mother, a Rosie fan, for sure.
Unfortunately the waiting list for him was seven months. Another famous tattoo artist told me he was booked up for the entire year. So I trolled through tattoo magazines and websites in search of artists who were not quite as well known but still skilled. I waded through hundreds of portfolios and beheld every design imaginable covering a parade of flabby forearms, hairy backs, and bikini lines that no bikini had ever graced. I spent whole afternoons getting lost in the many ways one can decorate one’s body: crying Rottweilers, a crying mime’s mask, and a preponderance of tattoos on people’s stomachs featuring the rear ends of animals, tail up, cleverly using the person’s navel as the butt opening. Every possible celebrity has been permanently committed to someone’s skin: Christopher Walken, an elderly Bob Barker, Patrick Swayze as a centaur in a sleeveless Chippendales tuxedo with a double-helix rainbow behind him. Maddox Jolie-Pitt, for God’s sake.
It was hard to accept that my mother was aiming to join this particular club. When I told an artist friend of mine that she was going under the needle, he immediately said, “Wow—that’s so awesome. You should support her.”
“Yes, but would it be as awesome if your own mother did it
?”
He thought for a moment. “You know, I guess not.” That’s the thing: It was awesome if it was someone else’s mother.
My investigation of New York City tattoo parlors continued apace. I had come to accept that the tattoo artist would have a name like Snake or Double Z or Pit Bull or Whitey and would likely moonlight in a band (one artist’s band was called A Day of Pigs). But I didn’t want the actual place to be so freakily alternative that my mother would be unnerved, so that knocked out a lot of venues on Avenue C and the more hipster-clogged regions of Williamsburg. Something a bit more mainstream was called for.
Yet I could not find any senior-lady-friendly establishments. You would think a tattoo parlor for the Eileen Fisher demographic would have cropped up by now, with cheery daffodil walls and free pots of decaf coffee and day care for the grandkids while tattoos are applied.
Perhaps a New Jersey–based establishment would make her feel slightly more at home. Again I went to the Internet and spent a weekend hunched over my computer, narrowing down a list of candidates, before finally deciding on Shotsie’s Tattoo of Wayne, New Jersey. My father had probably passed the place many times on his way to the JC Penney store he managed in the same town. The website was reassuringly welcoming (“Why not stop in and say hi? I’m sure you will feel very comfortable here and we can discuss all your tattooing needs and concerns”). Hi, I pictured myself telling the owner. I’m concerned that my mother is halfway around the bend. Mind if I pull up a chair?
I saw that the place opened at 1 P.M. on weekdays. Maybe if we went on, say, a Tuesday, right at opening time, no one else would be there. I reckoned that most tattoo seekers would venture in at night. If I were being honest, my anxiety was more about my own comfort than my mother’s. I was privately relieved that we weren’t going to Avenue C. I wanted desperately to hustle her quietly in the back door, like a celebrity getting a secret brow lift at the plastic surgeon.
I was particularly drawn to the designs of a tattoo artist called “the Ink Shrink.” So I dialed Shotsie’s to ask him a few questions, running over to my stereo first to turn off the classical music station that was playing in the background.