Say A Thing: Do A Thing.
If you say you’ll do a thing, you should do that thing. Otherwise why bother saying anything at all? Your word is as good as meaningless. Thus the Guild; thus I live.
Or so I thought.
Then one day, tattoos came up in conversation…and guess what I found myself saying…
[divider]When I talk to people about tattoos, I hear the same old thing over and over again:
“I’d love to have something etched permanently into my skin, but I don’t like that it would be permanent and I don’t want to suffer any kind of discomfort in the process.”
I wonder to myself, “Would you also love to climb Mount Everest, but you despise being at altitude, hate physical exertion and think risking your life to stand on top of a peak is stupid?”
It seems to miss the point entirely.
That’s hypocritical of me, however. Despite loving tattoo culture and wanting to get tattooed for over a decade, I still don’t have any. Every attempt to work out a design for myself has failed horribly. My earnest efforts to come up with a ‘poignant and meaningful design’ using my hilariously stunted visual imagination have inevitably always ended up as a clusterfuck of cliches and confused concepts.
It’s no surprise: I have no experience in putting my thoughts, values and emotions into a visual art form, let alone in a format that will look good when drawn upon my body. Furthermore, I’ve always placed so much emphasis on the ‘meaning’ behind the design that I’ve overlooked the most important part: creating something beautiful and/or wonderful that will come to mean something in its own right, on account of being created uniquely for me and drawn upon me in a manner that will last forever.
I also have this bizarre tendency, when talking about tattoos, to use the expression “I don’t know what I’d get…” It’s as if I think I only have one chance to be tattooed; as if this one tattoo has to be a perfect summary of my entire character, or it will be a total fucking disaster that I’ll regret forever.
It’s stupid.
I swore by the Full Moon that I would never be the type of person who says “I’d like to do X, but…” and then lists a collection of excuses that essentially explain why I don’t really want to do X.
I want to get tattooed. So it’s time to do something about it. This is, after all, my first year of doing things I’ve always wanted to do.