Why I Got a Tattoo at My Age
Reinventing myself after 60 called for a serious commitment to letting go
At the age of 15, my son told me, “Nothing lasts, Mom, not even the good stuff”. It’s a wise observation but then Scout, as I call him in my writing, has been my masterclass in Stoicism since the night he was born.
When Scout got his first tattoo at age 18 years give or take an hour or two, I wasn’t in favor. How could he commit to some passing fancy to wear on permanent display for the rest of his life?
He chose a mountain range he likes to hike and had it inked over his heart. More tattoos followed including one of a rock with googly eyes. It’s from the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once—a reminder that, given an infinity of options, any form of permanence is only one possible outcome.
Whenever I caught sight of Scout’s tattoos, it was like finding scribbles in the margins of a beloved book. Never mind that the ‘book’ didn’t belong to me, I felt as if something that should have been important and enduring had been defaced and trivialized.
Reinvention and revolution
Scout and his brother joined the military when they left high school and I became an empty-nester. Almost overnight, my life didn’t fit anymore. The house was too roomy, my job hung heavy around my shoulders, and my social life was about as exciting as mothballs. I felt like I was living inside someone else’s itchy old overcoat.
I needed to reinvent myself so I quit my sensible 12-year office job and dabbled in ideas for a deathtech start-up. It was so fun to tackle something completely new! (A story for another time). I didn’t get to build my app but I was re-energized and curious and I discovered that playing with ideas in words—writing, delights me.
Maybe I could become a writer, I thought, a ‘real’, full-time one. Instantly, I was a teenager trying on a cool leather jacket that I couldn’t afford. It was a terrible idea, and all but guaranteed to get me in trouble with the authorities in multiple jurisdictions. But it made me feel kinda badass.
Questions of identity
I’ve been kinda badass before, many years ago. When I had outworn the dreams of my early adulthood, I went to Kenya to find my family’s roots and when I didn’t find myself there, I traveled on and kept looking.
It was 1986, the tail-end of apartheid but I went to South Africa anyway. In Durban, my passport was stolen (oh, the irony) and I was taken to the police station to try and identify the culprit from a hefty volume of mugshots.
Among the one-eyed, pock-marked, beaten, and sly, was a man with a crude tattoo of a question mark on his forehead. Who on earth was he? What was his life about?
I stared at the blank eyes of the question mark man while a group of policemen discussed whether the White or Colored department should deal with the nice British girl with undeniably brown skin and an ethnic African name. Who did these men think I was?
Come to that, who did I think I was? I had no answers but at least, I had arrived at the right question.
Magical thinking
I have needed to reinvent myself several times since then—becoming a mother, various career changes, divorce, and more. Each time is a crossroads and my method is to approach it like Daniel Day-Lewis with a new script. I go all in on becoming who I need to be, living it until I am it.
This isn’t fake it til you make it, I don’t fake anything. In fact, I am more aware than usual of who I really am—the habits and assumptions I’ll have to reexamine in light of my new circumstances, the baggage from my past that needs to be overcome or at least rearranged.
It rarely works out the way I expect and I’ve found that success depends on having an interesting script along with a willingness to improvise.
As I considered becoming a writer, the idea rhymed with something inside me. It was a role that gave me a voice and perhaps I could say something worth listening to. I would need a supportive cast of characters—guides and mentors to offer direction, so I dived into books about writing authored by writers.
My tattoo is on Liz Gilbert
One of my favorite books for a writerly mindset is Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert. As a traveler, the soulful, hopeful curiosity of Eat, Pray, Love resonates, and although my life doesn’t feature in a Julia Roberts movie, I always felt like Liz and I could be friends.
In Big Magic, Liz says she follows her urge to write because it ‘brings her alive’ and she doesn’t want anything to come in the way of that. She extolls writers to be ‘childlike’ in their capacities for wonder and exploration. And then to do the work, no matter what—get something on the page, carve it, coax it, wrestle it into some form of submission then publish it and let it go, imperfect as it undoubtedly will be.
Perfectionism is the scourge of writers, it squelches playfulness with fear of failure. It’s a lesson offered by all the authors I read but deep into Big Magic, Liz shares a personal epiphany.
She writes about her friend, Eileen who gets herself tattooed in the way other people treat themselves to a cheap pair of earrings. When Liz asks how she can be so casual about something so permanent, Eileen says, “But it’s not permanent”. Confused, Liz thinks her friend is saying that the tattoos are temporary until Eileen sets her straight:
“My tattoos are permanent; it’s just my body that’s temporary. So is yours. We’re only here on earth for a short while, so I decided a long time ago that I wanted to decorate myself as playfully as I can, while I still have time.”
The big ‘aha’ for Liz was that while she was putting ink on paper, not her skin, the significance of the gesture was the same—be playful, decorate the world with your printing while you still can because one day it will all be gone.
As I digested that thought and recognized the wisdom of boldness in it, I realized with a shock that I would be getting a tattoo.
Impertinent ink
I still find it difficult to explain that reaction. I didn’t have a reason to get a tattoo, but I also didn’t have a reason not to. The tattoo became an obsession. I researched everything I could find on tattoo history, design, and procedure, all the time wondering if I would suddenly come to my senses or lose interest in the whole business.
One night, as I drove through my darkened hometown, the only sign of life shone out from the tattoo parlor. I popped in planning to pop right back out again if the lights were being kept on by an apprentice too young to go buy beer but instead, I met Forrest Curl, a former teacher from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). He was finishing up for the night but he could add me to his schedule for the next day—what did I want done?
Much of my writing is informed by dying, loss, and grief and I had found a picture of a crow drawn in a mandala style that enhanced its spiritual symbolism. Forrest worked Scottish bluebells and marigolds into the design as flowers of memento mori.
He has been wielding a tattoo gun for 33 years and his oldest ever client was over 90. I asked Forrest what the tattoo will look like when I’m an old biddy in a nursing home. “It’ll look like you’re a badass with history”, he told me.
When I finally submitted myself to the chair to be inked, I knew it would hurt and was glad. Forrest wasn’t surprised, “People get tattooed for all kinds of reasons, it’s cathartic”.
Catharsis; the word resonates with undertones of purging, resolution, and release.
People’s reactions to my tattoo vary depending on their age. Scout and his generation say, “Cool!”, while folks closer to my age get uncomfortable and don’t say much of anything. I know what they’re thinking because I’ve thought it too—they’re looking at doodles on the page of a book. What they see doesn’t feel appropriate, not at our age, it isn’t quite respectable.
I could have made the tattoo less conspicuous I suppose, chosen a pretty butterfly and had it placed demurely on my shoulder blade. But I didn’t want something that looked like it could have been a piece of harmless high jinx.
Some people ask me if the design means something and I tell them about crow symbolism but that’s not what it’s about, not really.
Historically, tattoos have always been more than decoration. They have been used as rites of passage, to represent the internal experience of confronting life-size issues and moving through them. Resolution and release—catharsis.
My decision to create a new life, to strip away everything without essential purpose, and reconfigure what remained into a useful, workable, interesting future, was challenging. Doing the work of living into it is too hard to be commemorated by a delicate flower on the inside of my ankle.
My tattoo is about reaching this major crossroads of my life and choosing a direction for myself. There are no signposts for the path I am taking, the crow is the closest thing I have to a map.
While I was writing this story, Scout bought himself a tattoo gun. If I ever publish a novel, I’ll have him give the crow a book with its pages open to the world. And if I ever meet Elizabeth Gilbert, I’ll thank her for sharing the epiphany of tattoo ink.
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I love this piece so much, Beth! It speaks to our motivation to mark transitions and rebirths. That's absolutely what my tats are for me. I'm so thrilled to have read this. And also, absolutely beautiful writing. Thank you for your openness!
I love this! Thank you for sharing your tattoo story. This quote resonates with me so much: "I have needed to reinvent myself several times since then—becoming a mother, various career changes, divorce, and more. Each time is a crossroads and my method is to approach it like Daniel Day-Lewis with a new script. I go all in on becoming who I need to be, living it until I am it.