I knew as soon as the tattoo was done that something was wrong.
The whir of the machine had stopped and my tattoo artist, Ariel, was snapping off her gloves. The employee at the station next to mine leaned over, curious to see the final product. I heard her exclaim how much she liked it.
Ariel nodded, satisfied. The two of them looked at me, and I glanced down to see the tattoo Ariel and I had spent the past two hours designing, drawing, redrawing, and finally deeming perfect. The tattoo that was costing me a whopping $450 (before tip), my 27th birthday present to myself. It looked exactly as I had hoped it would: a palm tree coming in through a window, etched in single needle into my right bicep.
Delicate, minimal, the kind of tattoo I would see on an artist’s Instagram and wish were mine. I looked up at Ariel. Her smile widened.
“What do you think?” she asked.
It was perfect, and I was going to throw up.
It’s important to understand that the palm tree tattoo was not my first visible tattoo. It wasn’t even my second. In the year leading up to my 27th birthday, I had become rather obsessed with tattooing, getting a three-panel visual representation of the last line of “Roadhouse Blues” by The Doors on my left tricep: “I woke up this morning and got myself a beer, the future’s uncertain and the end is always near.”
Six months later, I stopped drinking. Joke’s on me that I have a beer bottle permanently inked into my arm.
I also have Darth Vader on my left forearm; above that, a Harry Potter tattoo. By the time I found myself in the chair this time, I was a pro.
I had chosen Ariel Wyu, a well-respected and increasingly famous tattoo artist from New York who frequented the Bay’s prestigious Black Serum shop, and pitched her my idea. I was well on my way to having my arms covered in puzzle pieces, the style that works better than a sleeve for someone as indecisive as I am.
After the oohing and aahing, I moved to the mirror to survey the tattoo. Immediately the panic began. My arm looked—different.
I hear this refrain a lot: “I want a tattoo, but I’m too indecisive.” This is completely fair, and a good reason not to get one. But it’s often surprising for acquaintances to learn that I am also extremely indecisive. I’ve spent hours agonizing over which tattoos to get, who to have do them, and where to place them my body.
I have so much anxiety about decision-making that it often paralyzes me. I didn’t choose where to go to college until the last possible day, and then spent the next four years convinced I had made the wrong decision. After college I made a different life plan every year, convinced each was finally it. One year it was medical school. The year before that it was a Ph.D. in English. The year before that I was going to be a political operative. They all fizzled out.
It’s hard for me to choose because I obsess over how my life would turn out if I had chosen differently. These paths not taken are ghost highways that haunt me, twisting and turning toward a destination forever hidden in the fog.
But this fear—or letting go of it—is exactly why I love getting tattoos: with each one, I feel a little bit less indecisive. Sure, I am still too indecisive to choose just one tattoo; I have to have several dozen. But each time I put something permanent on myself, it makes other decisions easier. Other choices are reversible: graduate school, jobs, even relationships. But tattoos are forever.
For this particular tattoo, though, I wasn’t particularly indecisive. In fact, I’d been planning it for years. Essentially, I love palm trees. If I were a tree, I would be sexually attracted to palm trees. I sort of am already. They represent everything I dreamed of as a child. I am from Washington State, and I hate evergreen trees with a passion. They remind me of dreary weather and oppressively dark winters. Every holiday, when I return to my rural hometown and see the evergreens lining our driveway, I get the same anxious, trapped feeling I carried with me as a teenager. Palm trees, however, are freedom. They will forever remind me of California, the beautiful state to which I escaped as an adult.
And Ariel’s delicate linework fit the look I wanted. When I learned she would be tattooing at Black Serum in the Mission on the week of my birthday, it felt like fate.
I wanted it off me. I felt an urge to cut out my skin around it, replace it with new, untouched flesh. I felt unhinged.
After the oohing and aahing, I moved to the mirror to survey the tattoo. Immediately, the panic began. This was unexpected. My arm looked—different. The ink felt intrusive, the image alien. I didn’t like the placement. Why had I been so hesitant to ask Ariel to put the stencil on different parts of my body?
These thoughts had occurred to me after other tattoos, but never with such intensity. And there was something else.
When I got home, the tattoo still wrapped in second skin, I cried into my pillow. I wanted it off me. I felt an urge to cut out my skin around it, replace it with new, untouched flesh. I felt unhinged.
It wasn’t just my fears about the tattoo’s imperfections that shook me. In the mirror, I had seen something almost prophetic: a vision of what I would look like in my coffin. This tattoo — fainter, but still there — on my dead arm. This tattoo would outlive me.
I wasn’t expecting to feel this fear, the old lingering doubt that I had once again made the wrong decision and would bear the consequences forever. Recently my life had started to feel as if it were finally falling into place. I had a plan to quit my job. I was applying to graduate school again. I was determined to move to Ireland. This, after many aborted attempts at figuring out my life, finally felt right.
But the question lingered: What if this was just another phase, doomed to fizzle out like my medical school applications? I wasn’t getting any younger. In fact, when I did a quick calculation, if I lived to 81, I had already lived a third of my life. And that image kept floating in front of me: my dead body, with the palm tree tattoo.
I often think the idea of permanence, of forever, is too difficult for humans to comprehend. It is too large a frame to visualize, like centillion is too high a number to imagine. When people talk about tattoos as “permanent” or lasting “forever,” they really mean “until you die.” I suspect this is the euphemism behind assertions of indecision: they are afraid to think about their death. And when you think about your death, you inevitably think about the time you have on earth and whether you are using it wisely. For indecisive people like me, this is terrifying.
It took me two weeks to get used to the palm tree tattoo. Time, and my friends’ repeated reassurances, helped diminish the anxiety. Now it is one of my favorites, and by far the one that gets the most compliments. A year later I have two more tattoos on my arms, and I don’t plan to stop.
The feeling of indecision has not gone away. After my most recent tattoo I felt the familiar ache. I suspect I always will. That’s what is so thrilling about getting tattoos: you don’t know if you’ll love them forever or if you’ll regret them. They are a leap of faith.
Most of all, tattoos teach me to trust my decisions, even when I am unsure. By being more confident in how I am spending my time on this earth, I am less terrified by the specter of death. Tattoos don’t erase the indecision, but they help me work through it.
When I signed my loan agreement for graduate school, I had a panic attack. When I arrived in Ireland, I was convinced I’d made a mistake. For about two weeks I wanted to quit and come home. But I didn’t, because I knew that sometimes you need two weeks to get used to something new, to adjust to the idea that your life will forever be different.
And if not, I suppose there’s always tattoo removal.
