Tattoo

For ages now, my friend Bri and I have been talking about getting memorial tattoos, i.e. tattoos that memorialize someone who has died.

In our cases, they would be my brother, Ted, and her mother, who died of breast cancer when she was five. We’ve talked designs and locations. She has scoured Instagram for artists and made queries. And just when it seemed like it would all be too complicated—not the least so because she now lives in L.A.—it all came together.

Bri was in town visiting family last month. She called me up one day and asked if I was busy the next Thursday and when I told her I didn’t have anything particularly pressing on my calendar she said “We’re getting our tattoos!” Or something like that. I might be taking liberties with the quote.

I’m not sure when I became aware of memorial tattoos as a genre. I mean, I’ve seen people’s names and birth and death dates printed on various people’s bodies forever. But it didn’t quite resonate for me that it was a thing until I went to the annual meeting of Compassionate Friends a few years ago and there was an actual session on it, run by a brother and sister who had matching tattoos in honor of their sister. I believe their mother had one, too.

I was, of course, intrigued. And then quickly overwhelmed.

How did you pick a design? THE design? What was right to capture a life? What if you made the wrong choice? Wrong choices seem to be an inherent problem with tattoos anyway. Most of my friends who have them can point to a few wish-I-hadn’t-gotten-that-ones. I didn’t want a dud, especially linked to my brother on the grounds that that would a) suck and b) he’d kill me if he were able.

And then, how did you find the right artist? This brother and sister duo said something about checking out artists on Instagram, which my phone dislikes (long story).

For eons, it seemed, I was stuck on what to get. A likeness? No, too much could go wrong and it felt weird. I’ve seen too many hideous face-gone-wrong tattoos stories in my Facebook feed (and I always click). Initials? Nah. Dates? Nah.

And then one day I was visiting friends, and my friend Diane’s husband (hi, Mick!) said, “Well, what did he love?”

The answer was so obvious.

His Les Paul gold top. Anyone who knew him had seen him, sitting just inside the entrance to the laminar flow room, on a pull-out bench, guitar on his lap. He loved that thing.

It’s been a game of which artist could reproduce it ever since. Not easy. It would be intricate. Bri’s was easy—she wanted her mom’s signature in her handwriting. The guitar, however, felt…complicated…and like the same artist wouldn’t be into ultra simple and ultra complex. And we wanted to go together.

But then we realized the guitar could be spare and single line, too, as long as it captured the basic personality of it. I also realized I prefer the spare single line style. Problem solved.

On the designated Thursday, we trained out to Williamsburg (not that one, college friends, the one in NY). It was great. The place was…high end. (Bri: “We picked the bougiest place ever to get a tattoo.”)

We loved Uno, the artist. She looked at pictures of Ted’s guitar and played around with a few drawings with me, scaling it in size, drawing it with and without strings to see if it made it less busy, re-drawing the knobs, picking a spot on my inner arm that she thought would work…which was different from where I would have put it, but better.

Because the lines were fine, the needles were small and it didn’t really hurt. Bri and I chatted throughout and went out to lunch afterward. It was kinda like going for a slightly more involved pedicure.

I love the tattoo, but also (hoky alert) loved sharing the experience with Bri, who is one of my grief touchstones, too. Also, Bri and I used to work together. In fact, I hired her. And she tells me we started talking memorial tattoos during the interview.

“I was like, I’m never going to get this job,” she now says. We are both over-sharers, or maybe just overly up front, I guess, because it never occurred to me not to hire her.

When I got home, I texted a picture of my arm to Marc, my brother’s guitar teacher with the words, “recognize it?”

He answered immediately: “Yes, Very Cool, Les Paul.”

Mission accomplished.