The seventh Finding Everyday Inspiration task https://dailypost.wordpress.com/blogging-university/writing-everyday-inspiration/ is sort of a no-brainer for me. Given the choice of tweets offered, I am obviously going to go with this one.

“I´ve deleted enough tweets to know that I should never get a tattoo.”

–Abby Heugel

What I like most about this tweet is the fact that, when I first read it, it made absolutely no sense to me. I also like the way it starts out by referring to deleting items generated in the misanthropic universe of tweets and goes on, after a caesura of sorts, to conclude apparently incongruously that it is unwise to mutilate one’s own skin with ink. It took me a while to ‘get’ the, in fact, quite obvious, connection relating to regret.

I must admit that I have an instinctive aversion to tattoos. I regard them as a dangerous gateway to self-harming or worse—a sort of on-your-sleeve Munchausen syndrome. When anyone proudly shows me an elaborate tattoo that they have recently had etched into their epithelium, my suppressed reaction is always to cry out “Oh my God! You poor thing! What have you done to yourself.” I am aware that this is a quaintly old-fashioned point of view. I feel the same about plastic surgery.

I am especially disturbed when people ink themselves up with written words (often in a language and script of which they have no direct knowledge or understanding). I had no idea what the splurge of Sanskrit inked permanently down David Beckham’s forearm means and neither, I imagined, did he. It just looks cool. I liked to think that some wily Sanskrit-savvy tattoo-artist wrote something to the effect of “I am a dickhead” in the manner of a drunken frat boy on Beckham’s muscly arm. In fact—I just looked it up—it is his wife’s name spelt wrong, with a Sanskrit ‘h’ symbol before the ‘k/c’ in Victoria. Unsurprisingly Victoria is not a very popular name in post-Independence India.

If we wanted to say something by etching it permanently onto the support of our own bodies, (an impulse that already betrays compensation for a distinct lack of ability to communicate) shouldn’t it be something really important? And, if it were important, a short tweet of a tattoo surely wouldn’t do. You would have to tattoo the whole extent of the surface of your body with text, in the manner of Japanese Mafiosi or the premise of the TV series Blindspot or Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book, to achieve this end.

Tattooing only makes sense if the whole body is seen as paper and ultimately transmogrified into text. Anything short of this is mere quotation, subject to misattribution, misspelling and regret.

I once wanted a tattoo. A hammer and sickle, in red, yellow and black, if possible, on my left shoulder to demonstrate my continuing support for socialism shortly before the fall of the Berlin wall—a sort of last hurrah. I am very glad I never allowed that essentially cosmetic surgery to be carried out. History moves on and the last thing I want is to have it literally ‘under my skin’.

In his otherwise underwhelming autobiography, Morrissey reveals that he once fell in love with a guy who had the word ‘Battersea’—the name of a London neighborhood—tattooed onto his gums. I quite like this kind of tattoo—discrete, expressing loyalty to a local community and visible only to someone who has intimate access to your mouth. A tattoo revealed only in a kiss.