Body Art

This week, the one true love said, ‘when I get into the money, I’m gonna get a tat­too of a snake, maybe some­where on my ankle’.

I have a tat­too on my arm, a tribal-like thingie of a dragon, in black, but which is now so faded that peo­ple think I got it a long time ago.

I got the tatt done three years ago now, back when Karen and I spent every wak­ing moment together. We were brows­ing around Queensway Shop­ping Cen­tre look­ing for a cheap pair of san­dals, as one does when one is there, and we walked past the tat­too par­lour on the third floor. This was no ‘mod­ern’ tat­too par­lour, like the ones you’d see on Orchard Road and there­abouts. This was a Hokkien-speaking, chain-smoking, Kuan-Yin-Goddess-of-Mercy-tattoo-special-discount, simi-si-Celtic-design tat­too parlour.

Karen said, ‘Hey, let’s each get one’, while I looked at the sec­ond hand mobile phones in the adja­cent shop win­dow. Next thing I know, she leads me into the tat­too par­lour and pores through the clear folder of designs. Next thing I know, she picks a dragon and says ‘let’s get this one’. Next thing I know, I’m sit­ting on a chair in pain and there’s blood flow­ing down my right arm.

The tat­too ‘artist’ com­ments in Hokkien that I bleed unusu­ally pro­fusely and says he has to use extra ink. Or some­thing. At the other end of the par­lour, Karen is going ‘Ow, fuck! Dammit! It didn’t hurt so much the last time. Fuck!’.

Half a box of kleenex later, we leave the par­lour with blood­shot eyes and sport iden­ti­cal ban­dages which we lift and peek into every now and again on the way home, as if to check if the ink’s run. Her ban­dage is just below and to the left of her belly but­ton, while mine’s on my right arm.

So, Karen and I have the same dragon tat­too. Much like how some peo­ple close to each other have same rings, except it’s a bit harder to take off a tat­too. I don’t attribute any other spe­cial mean­ing to that. I am just too open to suggestion.

Puff the Friv­o­lous Dragon