Daily Newsie

I want another tattoo. I have five of them now, the most recent a gift for Father’s Day, and I’m getting that itch for more ink. I notice that the more I get the closer together they come, which makes me nervous because I’m pretty sure I’m fresh out of ideas. So far I have two for my mom (one of which matches a tattoo my dad has), one for my best friend, one for my (former) career, and one for my dad … and that’s pretty much what’s important in my life. Of course, my husband is pretty cool, but if I’ve learned one thing from celebrity gossip it’s that matching tattoos are the kiss of death in a relationship, and I’ve kind-of gotten used to having him around so it would be weird if we weren’t together anymore.

So I decided I want something huge and beautiful and colorful, but I’m not entirely sure what. I was thinking the other day about things that remind me of home — not necessarily my mother or my father, just home — like morning glories, thunderstorms, candles, grapevines, peacocks, and horses, and the idea struck me to get a morning glory vine climbing up my back or across my shoulders. Or maybe I could get an entire flower garden, with violets, lilies of the valley, morning glories, black-eyed Susans, hyacinths, lilacs, and peonies. Or maybe a horse underneath a grapevine, watching a thunderstorm roll in with a peacock as a candle softly illuminates morning glories twisting up a trellis.

A lot of tattoo sites show mathemeticians’ and physicists’ geeky-but-cool tattoos, like star maps, Feynman diagrams, or pi, but I doubt I could get away with inking Benoit’s theory of image restoration and repair on my person, although it would come in handy should I ever go into teaching. I’ve wanted for a long time now to have a fake mustache tattooed on my index finger so I could go incognito at a moment’s notice, but even my most fanciful friends are opposed to the idea. I suppose aspiring press secretaries should be circumspect in their body art — but how funny would it be to dodge a difficult question by suddenly turning into a Snidely Whiplash look-a-like?