Getting Tattoos With a Friend

 There’s these two girls who like to wander throughout New York City while it looks like everyone else is working and they’re not doing fuckall besides walking, seeing where the roads take them and what they could find along the way. Sometimes an AA or NA meeting was on the menu, definitely a stop at the good bodega close to her house for snacks and Juul pods, hit a grocery store for Kombucha, CVS for laxatives, maybe a Target for toilet paper. These girls spend a lot of time waiting for life to happen while it’s happening all around them.

Some days, though, if it was nice out, or it was raining, or one of them was sad, or purely out of boredom, they might head out to SoHo to get tattooed at a spot next to a thai restaurant they thought only existed on UberEats. They don’t get out much. I’m sure there’s some sort of psychological reason as to why these girls often ended up at a tattoo shop at, like, noon on a Tuesday in January, and years later, looking back, I can’t figure out why, which is a really beautiful thing. 

Because it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. The tattoos didn’t really matter, the things we chatted about while we waited for each other to pick out a design didn’t matter, what we did to our bodies, how we branded ourselves, our sobriety, the relationships we were in at the time, the friendship we had, the youth we tried to hang onto while sitting on her couch discussing therapy stuff, doesn’t really matter at all. It all felt so heavy at the time, so life crushing, so in need of being discussed. All of it felt that way, just regular life shit felt almost terrifyingly impossible. Sobriety felt like a death sentence, and everyone around them was making them feel like it was one, too. Their whole existence revolved around sobriety at the time. These girls were waiting for a career to be dropped in their laps as if they fell down from the sky. They were waiting for babies to arrive without having to even think about sex. They were waiting for something to make them feel like they had found God. 

I guess the tattoos were the only thing that grounded them at the time

It could be that they just liked the design

It could be because getting tatted feels like doing drugs- watching the tattoo artist set everything up, the anxious leadup to the needle entering the skin, then feeling a mild, soothing, numbing, sweat inducing pain for an hour or so, then returning to the world brand new. 

Who’s to say, really? 

Those friends don’t talk anymore. 

I guess one of them evolved out of it, or maybe they both did, but in their own unique ways, and they just never could find a way to come back together. Even though none of that time period mattered, because they weren’t doing much of anything at all, it’s the time that taught them the most. They grew up together on that couch, while walking the streets of NYC with no destination in mind, while getting tattooed, while fighting with the bodega man about the price of cigarettes, while going out one night in Brooklyn, while sitting in Tompkins Square Park. They learned what it was like to be deeply, spiritually bored. Everyone has to learn what that feels like, at some point, otherwise they’re not a well rounded person and it’s best not to trust them. What’s the last thing you did when you were bored? There are girls who sit on stoops, in stairwells, in parks, against the walls in an alleyway. Girls who are so terribly bored they’re waiting for their lives to start because the only way they know how to live is by going with the flow, never taking action and never taking accountability for anything. Too many choices, too much time, no sense of urgency. These things lead to waiting for decades for something to happen, if only to remind them there’s still something beautiful out there that they haven’t found yet. 

If none of it matters, though, then why not get tattooed. How could time ever be wasted in a tattoo shop? All those girls who are out there waiting for all that thrilling life stuff to drop out of the sky should be in a tattoo shop waiting for their friend to pick out a design. That’s a proper way to spend one’s 20’s.