The story of my first tattoo goes like this: One night in middle school, my friend Stephanie spent the night at my house. We were camped out in my bedroom and bored. We had watched “Clueless” so many times that we could recite all the best lines. Food had been ordered, delivered and devoured. We prank-called all the cute boys in our class and even some of the not-so-cute ones. One of us suggested, half-jokingly, that we give each other matching tattoos, something discreet enough to hide from our parents but accessible enough to show off at school come Monday.
I was scared, but as the youngest of five girls, I was familiar with the power of rituals — the way a shared secret between women can be its own kind of power. Abstinence was not an option. I watched as Stephanie used a Bic lighter to heat up and — theoretically — sterilize a safety pin before dipping it in ink. I stuck out my chubby ankle and closed my eyes as she began poking the tender meat of my leg in an uneven staccato pattern.
When she was done, I leaned over to admire her handiwork: a patchy approximation of a heart, fashioned out of eight or nine dots, seared into my left ankle. Then I did the same to her. Afterward, I felt giddy, buoyed by a new realization: My body was mine to do with what I liked. The thought was instantly addicting, as was the way the tattoo tightened the bond between me and Stephanie. We had matching tattoos, which basically meant we were sisters.
A few years later, I got another one. And another. In all, I’ve gotten six best-friend tattoos, always in pairs, always with someone whose relationship I wanted to commemorate at a particular moment. There’s the pair of triangles on my wrist that I share with a friend, intended to symbolize — perhaps paradoxically — the inevitability of change. There’s the wreath I paid a tattoo artist $60 to lay on my inner arm — a tribute to the flowers I’m rarely able to leave by my father’s gravestone. I got that one with a friend who had recently lost his grandmother; his was a series of boxes in the same spot on his body, a coded tribute to her. Another friend I knew from college in Virginia decided that we needed matching sets of daggers on our outer ribs, both because they would look good peeking out from a tank top that summer and because they would serve as protective amulets against the unrelenting crush of the city we’d moved to after graduation.
Getting a tattoo is arguably one of the most insane decisions a sensible human can make. A sharp needle made up of much smaller needles hammers into your skin up to 3,000 times a minute, punching through skin, blood and collagen fibers, in order to deposit enough ink to leave a permanent mark. But not too permanent; tattoos inevitably deteriorate over the years, as the ink migrates or breaks down and the skin loses some of its tautness, slowly melting the design into a smeared photocopy of the original. Over each tattoo hovers a cloud of doubt.
All of these elements — the danger, the fear, the foolishness, even the pain — contribute to the thrill, which doubles when you persuade someone to do it with you. There’s nothing that reinforces a bad choice like doing it in the company of another. It makes the deed easier to rationalize, both in the moment and in the seconds, hours, years to come after it is done.
And best-friend tattoos require so much prep work, which adds to their legitimacy. First, a friendship must be deep enough to warrant the rite; then the perfect symbol must be found to forge the bond. Instagram and Pinterest are awash in ideas: Beavis and Butt-Head, two halves of an avocado, yins and yangs that nestle when two arms are pressed together. A guy I know from Arizona recently texted me a photo of a ruffled roaring cougar’s head stamped on his upper thigh, something he got with his friends the last time he was home. Another told me about the Venn-diagram tattoo that she shares with her closest friend. During a rough patch in their relationship, she caught sight of the overlapping circles and remembered the love that had led her to permanently alter her body, easing the friction.
Matching tattoos don’t ensure the longevity of a friendship, any more than any other mutual hardship. I’ve since grown more distant from all of the people I’ve been inked with over the past two decades. Nothing catastrophic happened. There were no unforgivable betrayals. It was simply the natural tectonic shifts that occur as people move through life and drift apart. I’m not even in touch with the girl who gave me that first lopsided heart tattoo, though I get occasional glimpses of her life on Facebook. As for the pinpricks she gave me, they’re still visible — but just barely.
I don’t regret any of the ink. When I look at it, I smile and think about the feverish throes of friend-love and how lucky I was to have felt it more than once. Recently a friend asked me to get a tattoo with her — a lightning bolt, or something similar, to symbolize how we invigorate each other with a neon-white energy. I hesitated at first: What if the same thing happens? What if we ultimately go through with it, only to move apart? But it feels worse to let a love go unrecognized. Instead, I choose to paint a time capsule onto my body that represents the ferocity of a feeling — one too rare to go unacknowledged.
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