Inked, Sagging, and Concerned 🫟

My coworker told me the other day she has over twenty tattoos and my face did a thing I didn't authorize. Just a full system reboot, right there in the break room, next to a microwave that smells like last Thursday's soup.

Twenty. That's not a decision anymore. That's a subscription.

She showed me a few. A little one on her wrist — a wave, or possibly a slug, hard to tell under the fluorescent lights. Something small on her ankle. She's thirty and the ink looks great on her, honestly. Crisp black lines sitting exactly where they're supposed to sit.

And instead of my brain saying "nice," it started doing arithmetic. What happens to twenty tattoos at seventy? Because skin does not stay the way it leaves the factory. It sags and it spots, and it bruises if you look at it funny. I've been looking at my own arms funny for a decade.

So picture me at seventy-eight with twenty-plus tattoos. The dolphin on my hip — a majestic creature in 2011 — has spread into a shape with no discernible meaning. The roses on my shoulder bled into each other somewhere around menopause and now read as an injury I sustained in a war I never attended.

People would ask questions. A nice aide at the home would be helping me into a tub chair, spot the mess on my forearm, and go way too polite about it. A tiny pause. A soft "oh!" Then suddenly the whole floor thinks I was in some kind of situation. Bruised and abused. Me. A woman whose most dangerous activity is prying open a yogurt lid that's sealed like it holds evidence.

That's the part that gets me. Not the needle. Not the price. It's being eighty and having a grandchild ask what each one means, and me having to explain that the little star on my foot meant "summer of 2011" and now it looks like a coffee ring on skin that's seen things.

I did the math, which nobody requested. To hit twenty tattoos at my coworker's pace I'd need to start immediately and keep going for years, and I can't even commit to a conditioner. I've used the same blue bottle since 2019 and I still eye other bottles in the shower aisle like I'm about to cheat.

The cost, too. Twenty tattoos would run more than my car, and my car runs on a jump start and optimism, so maybe that comparison flatters nothing.

Young people with tattoos look intentional. Old people with tattoos look like the tattoos got loose. I saw a man at the pharmacy with a faded anchor on the back of his hand and I spent a full minute convinced he'd been branded by a cattle farm.

Your turn, and I need real honesty because I already embarrassed myself: how many tattoos do you have, and have you thought about what they'll look like when you're old? I have zero and I'm still worried about mine.

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