Tattoos

I don't have any tattoos, even after eight years in the Navy and traveling around most of the world, I managed to avoid them. Not that some aren't interesting. A good friend in the Navy, Chuck Soper and I, used to visit the tattoo parlors on Broadway in San Diego and watch the sailors and Marines getting inked there. None of the available tattoos were really appealing though and we never got drunk enough to just get one for the hell of it.

A few years later when my ship pulled into Pearl Harbor I went to the sub base to visit Chuck who had been stationed there after our various fire control schools. At lunch, he showed me his new tattoo. Seems he had gotten involved with a local woman who knew this old Chinese tattoo artist in Honolulu. The man was a traditionalist and made his own tattoo needles from bamboo. He laboriously pricked the ink into the skin by hand, working from his own designs. Chuck had a marvelously done dragon entertwined among bamboo. I loved it. But, learning that it had taken a couple of months to complete, and me having only a few days in port, it was not to be.

My wife got a tattoo in California when our children were young. A nice bracelet with two pendants engraved with the initials of our kids.

Now, on Monday next, it appears I'll be getting my first tattoo. I'll undergo a "dry run" for the beam radiation treatments that will locate the exact area to be zapped during the upcoming real treatments. To mark the spots, small tattooed dots will be place into my skin. Not exactly what I had in mind, but you have to go with what works.

I have been considering getting an actual artistic tattoo to commemorate this part of my life and to remind me of what is important and inevitable for all of us. I'm leaning toward a colorful representation of The Day of the Dead sugar skull. We celebrate The Day of the Dead here in the southwest USA because it is a time of remembrance and respect for those who have gone from us. It's a journey we all must make and the life we lead toward that end is important. This has become increasingly obvious to me of late.

Something we all should consider when we are sidetracked by life's clamor and craziness that is really irrelevant to living a good life as we can.