How I Got a Tattoo

“This your first tattoo?” the “artist” asked. Already I felt uncomfortable—46 years old (it was literally my 46^th birthday), hanging around at a place that I had so hoped would resemble a doctor’s office but that, instead, resembled the skanky apartments of slacker boyfriends from college, replete with ripped pleather couch, sophomoric posters, and foul incense; not dull Golf Digest on the waiting room table, but magazines called Pain—and his question gave me further pause. To me, it was akin to somebody asking the bride, on her wedding day, if this was her first husband. I mean, how many did a person need? Husbands, tattoos?

Yet I was, after all, getting a tattoo around my wedding ring finger. It was, as tattoos go, more matrimonial than most.

The route to this tattoo is lengthy and digressive, and I’ll try to tell it clearly. My father always said the women in our family didn’t think in a straight line and therefore our stories were not stories. They had no plot but were instead like roads that dissolved into dust or fell off bridgeless at the river, or like some rococo lawn ornament, pointless in addition to being ornately bejeweled with the irrelevant and unbecoming. The reaction they drew was often a deaf ear (my father could literally turn off his hearing aid) or, at best, a thought balloon with a question mark inside it.

So: in the beginning, there was a word. The word came from a book by James Salter. The book is Light Years and the word is inimitable . I love the scene where the word appears. In it, Salter’s husband character has just come back from his first tryst with another woman. Meanwhile, his wife has been at their lovely country home drawing pictures of eels all afternoon. She wants her husband to write a story about the eels, something to show to their little daughters. He laughs at her, still giddy from his illicit lovemaking in the city, and tells her that eels are “very Freudian.” She claims that the symbolism is tediously narrow, and, moreover, dislikes intensely the word he uses to explain the symbol: cock. “I hate that word,” she says. He asks her, “What one do you like?” She replies: “Inimitable.”

I have to clarify: she doesn’t think that inimitable is a substitute for cock. She simply prefers it as a word. Me, too. Boy howdy. I prefer it to a lot of other words. In fact, I may prefer it to all other words. Hence, the idea of having it tattooed upon myself. I’m a writer. I’m an individual. I like to think of myself as unique (“Everyone thinks they’re unique,” said my daughter recently; “Everyone thinks he’s unique,” I corrected.) As a wordsmith who likes to think of herself as unique, the word inimitable , as applied to me, to my body, seemed perfect. And it seemed that way for a few years. More than a few. Enduring as it did, I decided, finally, to have the deed done.

Here I feel an urge to digress. Maybe eight years ago I met the author of Light Years at a cocktail party in Albany, New York. He accidentally sat on my purse, so I saw that as a particularly opportune moment to accost him. “It’s fine,” I assured my literary hero when he apologized for crushing my black bag. He said he hadn’t stolen anything from the purse—ha ha ha—and I told him, in one big gush, that he was more than welcome to anything in there he wanted, the Xanax, the maxed-out credit cards, my son Noah’s London Tube pass I’d saved because his photo was so sweet, the birthday candle from the 80s, the fortune cookie fortune from my last date with my dead boyfriend, the broken cigarettes I secretly smoked, the spray bottle of elk urine I shoplifted from a hardware store in Philipsburg, Montana, all of it, whatever, just because later, I could say that he, James Salter, had taken...