A writer writing and sipping coffee - Tattoo my heart

                  
For a thousand years, writers have been sitting in coffee shops (and bars) writing stories.

I am in Starbucks, across the street from our Art Museum, sipping coffee, and bored as can be and reduced to staring out the window. All I am seeing is tourists covered in tattoos.

Tattoos are a mystery to me.

Here comes a tourist with tats (short for tattoos) all over his body. In the old days, if you saw a man covered in tats, he was a Hell's Angel biker, a mean scary bastard to be avoided. Now, a guy covered with tats turns out to be a Starbucks barista. He is so nice, smiles and greets you with, “How can I help you today?” 

So harmless.

Then there are the ladies with the "tramp stamps". A whole generation of women with tats on the base of their spine just so you can see it, along with their thongs. Yeah, pretty trashy. The best tramp stamp ever is still, "Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me."

I took a bold step and asked a young lady sitting at the table next to me why she had tats. She said, “Because I like it.” Well, I like rib-eye steaks but I don’t go around wearing raw meat (or cooked for that matter) like Lady Gaga.

I spy Black people with tattoos too. I can just barely see their tats and that's only because I am looking for them. Let's face it, tats are made with dark inks and dark inks just don't show up well on dark people. Kinda tells you that tats is a white people thing. If white people wanted black people to have tats, they would have invented light inks.

Some tourists' tats are roses, snakes, or naked ladies. It’s obvious that they are a born-again hippie flower child, a veterinarian, or an aspiring Lothario. Some tats are a strange cosmic pattern design with no discernible reason for it. Implication, “I am a deep mysterious person.”

Clearly, tattoos are some kind of personal statement. If I put your name on my body that will tell you, "I like you very much." Maybe it’s more like a sign that says you own me or own my heart. So now, in typical people fashion, we fight and we break up. Your ownership of me ends and I am stuck with your name on my body. My next girlfriend will hate you forever since your name will live forever on my body.

I would not get a tattoo. The short for tattoos -- tats -- puts me in mind of tatas, another word for boobs. You gotta be a boob for putting tats on yourself. Must be a pun about tats on tatas in this somewhere.

I see tattoos as a commercial device. We tattoo domesticated animals so we can identify them. We tattoo thoroughbred race horses so that we can always trace their all-important lineage. We tattoo cattle so that the ranchers can tell who owns them. Hate to say it but I think people are sheep for following a fashionable trend to get tats.

Let's say that one day in a wild crazed moment I weaken my resolve and get a tattoo. I would get something symbolic like the dollar sign, a “$”. Then, some strange cosmic karma design will kick in and I will be blessed with copious amount of “$” and become the world's richest man.

With lots of excessive “$”, I will buy you and own you and I will tattoo my name on your body.

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