is this the time for a tattoo?
/There comes a time in life when the unthinkable suddenly makes sense. Even if you never were a badass. Never sat on your Harley smoking cigarettes behind a dive bar, never wore studded boots with mini shorts, never got sick drunk at a party.
Well, one out of three ain’t badass, is it?
Then you think, nah.
I coulda, I woulda, I shoulda, I never did. I certainly don’t need to now. Somehow a good chunk of life has gone by, and all these things we said we’d do one day have ended up in the wastebasket of oh well.
For example, a tattoo, a so-called tramp stamp, but you didn’t hear that from me.
Something like 30% of the U.S. population has a tattoo. Way higher than I thought, maybe hidden in secret places. Tattoos have become commonplace, middle class, yet regretted if you complain they’re hot and sweaty, have outlived their message, are no longer a lusty symbol of rebellion.
Others say, cool as ever.
My Mom -- who felt she’d been born at the wrong time, ended up in the wrong place -- would have said cool.
I bring up Mom because now, at 94, she finally has some ink.
If Mom coulda, she woulda been a hippy artist on a commune. She ended up in the suburbs, like so many of us, with three kids and no proof on her thigh, her buttock, her breast that she really didn’t belong there.
Yet there she was. And at some point, after Dad left the house and we kids were gone, Cousin Steve, her future ink enabler, was there too.
Petite, single Mom took him in. Her sister, his mother, had died. Mom was 50, Steve -- a hulky guy with a broad smile who I never knew loved Mom so much -- was 20.
He changed the light bulbs, she doled out advice. It worked.
Fast forward 40 years.
Mom has turned 94, still no markings on her body, and Steve is way married with a couple of kids. He’s having a midlife crisis, or is feeling quarantine antsy, and is ruminating on what matters.
Mom is having no crises. She died 35 years ago.
Steve has resurrected her.
He’s tattooed Mom on his arm, Blanche, along with his Mom’s name, Shirley -- both under the blue-black wings of a badass eagle. He says they were the two most influential women in his life.
Now that is way cool.
For years I’ve been threatening my own eagle tattoo. Mom’s maiden name was Eagle and when the family texts we use eagle emojis. My car is the Eagle, with a stuffed bird on patrol in the passenger seat. My personal handle -- meaning the moniker I share with my husband -- is Soaring Eagle.
When we were kids, Mom told us the eagle statue in the center of the big department store downtown, Wanamaker’s, was donated by her family. It wasn’t, but from then on, I believed we chose the national bird.
But I’m not an eagle. When it comes to tattoos, I’m a chicken. Today I try to banish marks on my body, not collect them.
Yet Mom, living through Steve, has finally gotten the guts.
Maybe I shoulda too.
My cousin says the tattoo was on his bucket list -- a mom and aunt stamp, not a tramp stamp -- a tribute to the true Eagles we all lost when Shirley and Blanche died young.
Today, in this time of distance, of needing more things to touch, I was almost -- ALMOST -- headed to the parlor myself. Something tiny perhaps, like Mom, a baby eagle sitting on my ankle, just enough to finally give Mom her wings.
Then with the help of Facebook, Steve’s sentimental bicep popped up.
That was close.
I coulda, I woulda. I doubt now I willa. The eagle has flown.