i got my first tattoo in 1999. it was of a cursively-written M, with a heart attached to the curly part of it’s base. kind of like the astrological symbol for scorpio. i didn’t know that 2 years later i’d be dating a scorpio or that the person i was engaged to and i would split up a year after getting that tattoo. his name is mike. with an m. get it?
and everyone at the time and afterwards told me how stupid it is to get a tattoo of someone’s name or something obviously about someone else. but nope, i was determined to go for symbolism and my relationship with mike had taught me a lot about myself and the world, at that point.
after the breakup, people would ask what the tattoo was about. was i a scorpio? no, sorry, sagittarius. well, what was it? and i would be honest. then…why i didn’t get it covered up – because if i were a normal person, i would not want it to remind me of the wedding i never had or the year of self esteem recovery that i had to go through. i used to say that it reminded me of the type of relationship that i didn’t want to be a part of. it kept me relationally centred, you could say.
about 2 years into dating the doctor, he let me know that while the tattoo itself didn’t bother him – which, hey, that’s pretty cool, if your girlfriend’s running around with some other guy’s initials on her lower back/ass area – it did bother him that i told people the truth about it so openly. so i got it covered up.
with this maple leaf – the official reasoning being that it was to symbolize the 2002 gold medals of the women’s and men’s canadian olympic hockey teams. happy belated birthday, canada. and by the way, mike and i recovered a pretty good friendship a few years after the breakup and now, his tattoos outnumber my 5 in size and number (but i did buy him his first, so i got the bug into him).
if you wanna play half nekkid thursday, click the button on the left.
