Frankie magazine, February 2008
Editor – Jo Walker
I was sixteen when I took my first tab of LSD. It was beautiful – even when the three of us stood around what we thought was an enormous wondrous slug on the footpath, not realising until I touched it that it was a dog turd. But while acid can make flowers drip colours like hot icing and inspire your school locker to talk to you, it is often book-ended by two very awful states of mind.
The superiority/inferiority complex or the aptly deemed, paranoia versus pro-noia.
One being that the world is out to get you, in particular the FBI, and the latter, the pro-noia state of mind, is that the world is working for you. It was created for you. You are the chosen one, your friends are the chosen people and all signs are messages of greatness laid out for you. And while bomb bunkers, Dictaphones and facial twitches are several indicators of the paranoid species, bad tattoos seem to stem from the Pro-noia side of things.
I have a whale on one ankle, a sun on the other, and an‘original’ design on my back (or as I now like to call it, the female mantelpiece – just above my arse). All except for the ‘original’ were done before I was eighteen with the help of a fake ID card, pawnshops, and a job at Red Rooster. I believed I was connected to the whales, more than any marine biologist could ever fathom. The whales and I had a relationship. If I were to fall overboard in the ocean with nothing but a doughnut inflatable, I was adamant the whales would save me.
Then there’s my friend Gill Tucker of the band Spider Vomit. It’s an ongoing debate, but I think she’s got worse tattoos than me. On her mantel is ‘verity’ which translates to ‘truth’ in Latin (the reason I know this, is because I once wrote a teen angst poem with the word in it after trawling through the thesaurus) but worse than putting the dead language on her back, is the font she chose. ‘I just went with the first font on the menu,’ she now says in her defence. Not wing dings, but Verity in black cartoon-like letters with gothic edges. To top it off, she’s got a Japanese symbol (Gill is positive it means ‘imagination’ but is too scared to check now that it’s on her) and a star on her foot.
Then there is the tummy tattoo. Why do females persistently get tattoos on their stomach? Are we in complete denial of our biology? Do we think the man-made womb is coming to a store near you? A lady on the Gold Coast (it would be cruel to name her but you’ll know if you see her) had the idea of getting Odie tattooed on her belly. Think back to those toilet literature days of Hagar the Horrible, Footrot Flats and yup, Garfield. Remember the dog that always got his tongue tied in knots in those Jim Davis cartoons? Yep, that’s Odie. When this certain lady fell pregnant and her belly started to inflate, Odie grew too. When the birth didn’t go to plan and she had to have a C-section, poor Odie was cut in half. The doctor couldn’t care less about sewing him back together correctly, so while mother and child were in a kind of induced euphoria, the two halves of Odies floated in opposite directions across her stomach.
Worse are the people who get good tattoos, the ‘oh look at me, I waited til my brain had fully developed and was no longer trying to establish a subculture and putty up the holes in my psyche with sentimental symbols’ people. These people have the fine outline of folding boxes on the inside of their arms, fragile powerlines drawn between their shoulder blades, Japanese waves breaking on the shore of their ankles, swallows looping thread round their arms. These people are not your friend. They are not stupid, and we folk with stupid tattoos must stick together.
My partner and I are a good example of such loyalty.
Whilst not having the same teenage lack of conscience to pawn off family heirlooms as I did, he did earn a meagre amount at his family’s restaurant when he was seventeen, but not enough it seems. When he got an armband of something resembling kelp or barbwire round his arm, the tattooist stopped halfway and wouldn’t continue until there was more money on the table. Sixteen years later it is still unfinished.
So my advice is – f you’re heading to a parlour clutching a drawing you’ve been slaving over between bongs or a page torn from National Geographic of your totem animal, I have one more story to tell you. It is about a friend of a friend of a friend.
This friend spent many nights listening to weird music and drawing black ink pictures with lots of lines and squiggles that people who’ve had too much acid tend to draw. She chose one of them to be tattooed on her back. In sobriety, and I don’t mean the next day, but years later when the green smoke receded and some kind of daylight entered her brain again, she saw in her tattoo what could only be described as a Freudian delight. Penises and vaginas lurked menacingly on her back, all carnivorously swallowing each other.