baby got ink

I got a tat, a tat, a tat, a rattatatat, a tattoo toot.

Yes. Very scary. It's only my first and I say that with a capital "F".

Miss Pinky U and I bounded into the blue room at the back of a hair salon in downtown Boroko and sat down with the laid-back tatto artist AKA Willy - Mullet Willy with the short front and sides and the blonde dreads at his back. Willy from Solomons who has tapa cloth for decoration in his little inking kingdom and cuts a smooth relaxed persona and who tattoed himself when he was 12. And we flipped through 4 or 5 plastic sheafed folders of tat designs for half and hour and Pinky U picked one and I made one up and it took just as long to get ourselves permanently marked. For like ever and ever.

And to me it is strange to think that a major reason many people will never get a tattoo is because they're permanent. It's strange to me because all the other perduring marks on my body were not made by intention, they are scars, the physical memory of things that happened To my physical person as a result of events that were sometimes excursive, often painful, most often accidental and out of my control - and so then, why would I not prefer to have a body marking that had its providence, birth and reason from within me than without. After all, the primary characteristic all my scars share other than their permanency and lack of design is that they were involuntary:

• the massive scar tissue acrss my right calf from a car accident 19 years ago : sogeri mountain road 1988
• the scar above my right eye when the boy I did dawn-dashes with in first year uni accidentally dropped me on my head after twirling me around one sunny sunday afternoon : tennis lawn 1996
• the circular circle of scar tissue on my right arm when the school nurse broke a needle giving me a shot in primary school : sick bay 1988
• the scar on my left sole from when a spike went through my foot : bedroom 1981
• the black mole on my neck where babysister threw a bunch of keys at me and gauged me : dining room 1985
• the scar across my left index finger when I was spinning the spokes on my bike and I almost severed my digit : garage 1986
• the scar on my pelvis from a tissue biopsy : doctor's surgery 1999 & london hospital repeat 2003
• the anonymous scar from a long ago surgical procedure leaving a set of stitches to the right of my belly button : baby-time 1979
• the silky dark brown splodge above my right ankle from a tropical sore : christmas 2005
• and 5 marks across my lower back that mysteriously turned up one day ... the same day my uncle Mak was shot 5 times in his back : awaking 1997

  and so on and so forth ... just some of the visible traces of arbitrary events long gone which have left me with an enduring reminder.

And yesterday for the first time I marked myself. I mean, I got Willy to mark me. Permanently. Voluntarily. With Design. Out of a conscious decision rather than the result of some adventitious unintended chance of nature or unpreventable design of fate. And that felt good. So I am my own canvas. And the event of getting tattood can still be random, unpremeditated and spontaneous but it's the decision of the scaree and the design imprinted which makes my newest body scarring mine.

Miss Bomana - please forgive - I know we had a date to do this together and never did - but don't worry, when I come down to Sydney in oh-so-soon we will have a chance to rectify and I am getting another - a large and looong tat done blade to blade across the span of my upper back baby. Uh Oh!! Please come with. And JCD maybe you'd be up for a threesome?

It IS ever so slightly addictive.