I have one tattoo.  It’s a small, blue star on my right hip that I got when my friend Abby passed away when I was sixteen. My friends who went through the experience all got the same design in various locations.

Note that I said I was sixteen when I got the tattoo.  At the time, the artist never asked for my mother’s written permission to have the work done (despite the fact that I had a forged one ready to present to him, written by friend Kallie).  …Could have had something to do with the fact that we were a group of six or seven of emotional teenagers that had just attended their friend’s funeral a few days prior.  Just a guess.

I hid that tattoo from my parents for six years.
a) I don’t know why. It was small, hidden, unoffensive, and in memory of my friend.  What were they going to say?
b) I don’t know how. I honestly thought for a while that they knew about it, they just avoided saying anything.  That whole time was kind of difficult for my parents to deal with, so perhaps they just turned a blind eye.  Meanwhile, I developed a tattoo-covering reflex in which I’d pull the front of my pants up higher on my hips whenever my parents entered the room.  (I still do this.)

Earlier this year, when my parents were visiting me in Bloomington, I was reaching up toward a shelf when my mom asked, “What is that?”

“What is what?”
“Is that a tattoo?”
“This?” (Nonchalantly, as if it were a birthmark.)  “Yeah. I’ve had that forever.”
“Randall, did you know your daughter had a tattoo?”
“No.”
And then there was this collective feeling of, “Huh.” between the two of them.
And that was that.

No towering inferno? No parental wrath?  How anti-climactic! A secret kept for six years, only to be revealed with a mundane, “Huh..”!!!

I knew that if I ever got a tattoo again, it would have to be the right time, and the design would come to me.  Every so often I’d think about it, as if to ask myself, Is it time? And it never seemed right.

Then, last week, like lightning – I decided it was time.

I have no idea what it will be.
However, I can tell you it will not be a butterfly, rose, snake, or snake on a plane.