A TATTOOED HEART

In 1990 I tattooed my girlfriend’s initial on my right ankle. Did it myself with a needle bound in ink-soaked cotton thread.

I know – stupid, right? But when you’re fourteen years-old, and some deeply screwed-up girl fucks your mind at the same time as the rest of you, the tendency is to believe it will last forever. Thankfully, being fourteen and an idiot, I used India Ink; that initial – and my other two tatts – finally faded to nothing. It only took twenty years.

            Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t regret the tattoos themselves; it’s just that they were ugly and amateurish – they looked like prison tatts. I learned a valuable lesson: Think first.

            Over the next few years, whenever I had the money and the urge to get inked overcame me, all I had to do was spend a few minutes looking at that initial. That and the memory of the bathing beauty on my grandfather’s forearm, getting older and saggier as he did, were enough to persuade me to wait.

            “Wait” is the operative word. Teenagers are morons. So are most twenty-somethings. Had I done it in my twenties I’d have ended up with a winged guitar, the standard skulls and daggers or something equally naff. God forbid, today I could be looking at a dragon every time I remove my shirt.

            You see some beautiful body-art. Very little of it, though, comes from the tattooist’s wall. The best stuff tells a story; tells you something about the person underneath it. The best stuff is original. Over the years I’ve designed one or two pieces for friends. Because I knew them, I was able to come up with art that expressed their personalities better than number thirty-seven from the album could.  And there’s little chance they’ll ever bump into someone with the same tattoo.

            There’s an adage that says, Never tattoo anybody’s name on your body (unless, of course, it’s “Mother” or “Jesus”). Indeed, tattooists do a roaring trade in disguising such errors of judgement. Not sure I entirely agree. It’s that body-art as life-story thing again. And, having decided to mark yourself with someone else’s name, cover-up or removal is a cop-out.

Trying to erase a name or initial, or cover it over, is like trying to erase a person from your life – it doesn’t work. Your mind still knows they were there; you’ll still have the scar to remind you; and covering it up usually just makes a bigger mess. Even if it doesn’t, each look at the replacement will remind you of why it’s there; of what’s underneath.

It’s only fitting that my ex-girlfriend’s initial took twenty years to fade. In the two years I associated with them she and her family did twenty years-worth of damage. During those twenty years I lived a life worth remembering. My next tattoos will encapsulate some of it. They’ve had time to grow in my mind, and are already a part of me; I see them already. A deep part of myself will be visible on the outside – which is how it should be.

One of the old ones was a heart on my forearm. I could cover it up or show it, depending on my mood. It was mine. Now, it’s dissolved into my body. Only a faint scar betrays where it once was. There’s probably something in that.

PREJUDICE, HYPOCRISY

They’re funny things, prejudices. We all have them – to an extent, we need them. It can come as a surprise, however, when somebody has one against you.

            I was on my balcony smoking a cigarette when a car full of South-East Asian Muslims drove by. One of them happened to look a lot like Amrosi, the Bali bomb-plotter. “Fancy being brave enough to drive around looking like Amrosi,” I found myself thinking. “That takes some guts.”

            It wasn’t a malicious thought. It was barely a thought at all. But it stopped me. It got me thinking about friends and family who visit from the country and talk about “playing spot the Aussie”. To my memory, no Aboriginal person has ever made the same remark to me. No need, I hope, to elaborate that point.

            To visiting Caucasians the Asian population of Sydney’s Inner-West are all “chinks”; “slopes”; “fuckin’ gooks”. Those same “Aussies” might spend a moment to reflect that, to a certain generation of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian immigrants, they look just like the people who killed their brothers, raped their sisters and daughters, and burned or bombed their villages – and that it’s for those reasons that they fled their countries to build a new life here.

            The twin sister of prejudice is hypocrisy. Spending a couple of decades in Kings Cross, up to my eyeballs in the drug and sex industries, was a real education in that regard. Nobody does prejudice or hypocrisy like junkies and hookers.

            You have to see it to believe it. It’s really very funny. The dealers look down on the junkies and hookers who provide their living. Most of the hookers and junkies hate their dealers. The sex-workers look down on the junkies. The junkies look down on the sex-workers. Everyone looks down on the ice-freaks.

            And the sex industry’s even better. It’s almost like a caste system, where everybody despises the rungs beneath. The massage-parlour girls think they’re better than the hookers. The brothel workers think they’re better than the street-walkers; the high-class escorts better than both. The strippers think they’re better than all of them. Burlesque performers place themselves above the whole seedy business. And rent-boys? Forget about it – everyone looks down on rent-boys.

            We all need to feel better than somebody – especially if we’re fuck-ups. It’s a comforting thought, as you cry yourself to sleep, that somebody, somewhere, has screwed their life up worse than you have.

            Prejudice is an evolutionary throwback. Our distant forebears, in order to survive, needed to know that certain people, places and things were just bad. Belief is the same. If we had to spend time evaluating every single thought that comes into our heads or every situation or idea we encounter, we’d be simply unable to function.

            So, they’re helpful. That doesn’t mean, though, that we shouldn’t examine them occasionally and re-evaluate them. We all need to take time now and then to look at what we believe and throw out unreasonable prejudices.

            That’s how we avoid becoming assholes.