Squid

Someone asked me to sit down someday and explain why I've decided to use my body as a canvas.

Well, today is some day, but I don't really have a very good reason.

I first wanted a tattoo when I was 16 years old and had a Sassy subscription. Oh! Sassy, how you saved me from my dreary sub-suburban existence, how you showed me the path to coolness each and every month. How I waited with bated breath to see what next funny thing would be written on your spine. How I swooned when I read "We can't believe you people read these." You people! I was You People!

But I digress. There was a story about women getting tattoos, and a picture, I can still picture it, of a woman, probably about my current age, maybe a little younger, so hip, with her messy pulled up hair and loose white wide-necked blousey dress and stunning swallows dipping under her collar bones. She wasn't model beautiful, but she was beautiful. A kind of beautiful I wasn't used to - one that didn't ipso facto permanently exclude me. She was a kind of beautiful I could maybe be some day.

I wanted those tattoos so badly. I wanted to be her and her friends, doing what they wanted with their bodies. They were probably not hiding in their basements, away from their parents screaming at each other; they were probably not going to a high school where the best thing you could do was play volleyball and the only interesting thing you could do was get smashed. They were probably smoking and getting tipsy on good wine and having smart conversations and not shaving their legs. And having cool jobs, not cleaning toilets in baggy uniforms. And fucking whenever they wanted to. Wherever they wanted to. Not in cars and schoolyards and forests.

But I digress. I loved those tattoos. That I understood them as beautiful and powerful set me apart, and finally in a good way, from all but a core of my classmates. For the first time, I saw a kind of beauty that might include me, an achievable beauty. It still is. You need money, yes. And you need a good idea. But money can be saved and man, I got a million ideas I ain't even rocked yet.

Enough of that for now. I had another appointment last night.

And so I present to you: THE SQUID

Managed to sit for 3 hours, though by two and three-quarters I was counting time with the songs in a whisper.

When I breathe deep, the squid swims.

My last appointment is January 3rd, when I will get the whale on my bastard left side finished. And some bubbles.

It's going to be some pretty. Beautiful, even.