Bethany Keene
Eighteen to Twenty-One

_____When I was seventeen, I decided I wanted a tattoo. It was a rite of passage, something everyone does when they turn eighteen. A Chinese character on your lower back at that time is a symbol of something so much more than what it actually is. It is growing up, it is freedom, and it is the first real way of expressing yourself that will always be with you, something that will happily remind you of the crazy things you did when you were young. This is what we tell ourselves, and this is what I believed.
_____The Chinese character I chose for myself was “grace.” It seemed to embody the way I wanted to live, and so that made it somehow different than “love” or “happiness” or any of the other dozen or so Chinese characters that Americans constantly feel the urge to mark on themselves. To me, this decision made me more original than every other eighteen year old girl getting a Chinese character tattooed on her lower back. I chose to ignore the nagging question of what connection I have to China or Chinese culture, because other than an unhealthy obsession with Sesame Chicken, I am an Irish-Italian female living in Pennsylvania with absolutely no reason whatsoever that a Chinese character would have a special meaning to me.
_____I had a design drawn for me, and made an appointment at a tattoo parlor in the area. I read up on the risks, procedures, follow-up—everything, and woke up excited on the morning I was scheduled to go. My mother even wanted to come with me; she sat in the waiting room the whole time, scared to watch, but still there. She does not have tattoos, but was supportive of me making my own choices. When I arrived at the shop, the pony tailed, forty-something tattoo artist immediately took me into the back where I sat on a magenta folding table and had the outline of the tattoo photocopied and transferred onto my back, for the tattoo artist to follow.
_____I’m sure I was nervous, but I don’t remember feeling anything as I sat and looked around the small studio, every inch of the walls covered with sketches of tattoos, known as “flash,” and smelling slightly of stale cigarettes and coffee. The tattoo artist asked me if I wanted to make the design smaller and I briefly considered it, but decided to leave it the way it was, measuring almost exactly two inches by two inches. In my mind making it smaller would have compromised my intentions, negated my blatant display of self expression. The black stamp of independence would have been compromised. While he prepared the needle and the ink I situated myself and waited, and didn’t even consider the magnitude of what I was doing for a single second. I am not one to contemplate, nor am I a patient person. When I decide I want to do something, I do it, logic be damned.
_____I had to lie down on the table so the artist could work. When he began, the pain was there, but barely. It felt more like an intense vibration, like the world’s tiniest sander, than a needle. Any nerves completely vanished. He talked about how he sometimes gets blindingly painful migraines, and hides in the back hoping that no one will come to the shop that day. Secretly grateful that I was not one of the unsuspecting people showing up on a migraine day, I let him finish.
_____The whole process took about half an hour. When I finally got to see it in the mirror, I loved it. I paid my eighty-five dollars and believed it was the best money I had ever spent. I finally knew that I had done something for myself, something powerful that I would never regret. I was thrilled and remained thrilled for years.
_____Until the day I wasn’t.
_____I turned twenty-one in June of 2006. An eventful year, 2006 was, and as the year progressed, I began to feel like I was changing. I am engaged to my best friend of many years, the man who has known me since before I was even legally allowed to get a tattoo. Remaining friends didn’t mean we had never changed, in fact quite the opposite. We’ve changed together over the years, altered our perceptions, along with everything else in our lives. In the flurry of planning our wedding and getting ready to graduate from college, I had also begun to take yoga classes. Something frequently discussed in class was the need to remain authentic and genuine, with a certainty about ourselves and the choices we make. I began to feel inauthentic, as if I was posing as someone I wasn’t, like an airbrushed picture in a magazine.
_____The day it occurred to me that I wasn’t the same person anymore, the tattoo began to bother me. The realization that I had believed I would forever remain exactly the same as I am today seemed incredibly naïve. I literally couldn’t stand the fact that I had permanently put ink into my body, something that wouldn’t change and grow with me, slowly vanishing as I didn’t feel the need for it anymore. If every part of me continued to change over my lifetime, if every belief and opinion and experience altered me a little, this part of me would never change. It would never keep up.
_____Two months ago I walked into a dermatologist’s office, with very different kinds of pictures on the walls, and handed him two thousand dollars to get rid of my tattoo. The process of laser removal is long, sometimes stretching out to as long as ten months. It is also screamingly, blindingly painful, akin to the feeling of a thick, sharp, white-hot needle being jabbed into your skin until it hits bone, then yanked out again, then jabbed in again in the same spot. The smell of burning skin fills the room like the smell of the coffee in the tattoo parlor—pervasive, it lends realism to the moment. Plus, there are no guarantees that there won’t be scarring from the tattoo or from the laser. I had to use money from my school loans to pay for this, and while some might argue that it is not truly a necessity, to me there was no question. Some tattoos are beautiful; I still like and admire unique ones, with a sense of depth and personality behind them. But I will never get another.
_____My future sister-in-law is fifteen years old. She dresses in black, skateboards, wears lots of makeup and fingerless gloves. When I saw her for Thanksgiving, I warned her—do not get a tattoo until you are much older, until you are certain, until you have at least begun to grow up and become the person you will be. At eighteen, you are far from that person (Let’s face it, you’re probably just as far at twenty-one.) I know she probably won’t listen; I know I didn’t. It is, after all, a rite of passage.