The Rice And Wrongs: Tattoo Inspires, Despite The Scar

Story by Dan Nguyen 

| Published Oct 28, 2008

Getting a tattoo was one of the most spontaneous moments of my life.

One day while walking downtown, I impulsively decided to walk into a tattoo parlor with the partial thought, “it’d be cool to get inked out with one of these”.

One hundred dollars later, I was looking at my chest with a doodled bird I drew in my planner earlier that day.

The tattoo artists told me to buy a good lotion and sanitizer to keep my new piece of art clean and free from scabbing.

Unfortunately, I had no lotion back at home (seriously), and the hundred bucks I spent on the tattoo left me no budget to buy such a novelty.

Later that night, I started to ponder alternatives to the recommended materials the tattooist suggested I buy with the money I didn’t have.

The way I saw it, I wasn’t the only human canvas that was too broke to purchase expensive lotions and sanitizers; it’s not as if the ink-bearing population of this world is only restricted to the wealthy.

Then a light bulb went off in my head. I figured the key ingredient in a moisturizer was water-based.

Genius!

All I had to do was take as many showers in a day as possible. This way my fresh inked-up skin would never dry out.

Two days later, my housemates complained of cold showers, and I could no longer see the initial doodle of a bird. Instead, in its place was a mutilated lumpy hawk covered in a hard shell of scab.

The bird, which is located on my upper chest, now looked as if it just pooped out my nipple, and in its constipation popped blood vessels all over its body.

In a desperate act of stupidity to make up for not putting costly lotions on my tattoo, I took an even longer shower.

I frantically sprayed the stream of water from the shower directly onto my chest.

After 20 minutes of constant application of H2O, I notice that my bird was looking a little bent out of shape--literally.

I turned off the water and slightly touched my bird, which seemed to be a bit more misshaped than I had remembered.

Suddenly to my surprise, in one intact piece, the tattoo slid off my body.

Close to my feet next to my shower’s drain sat the scab of my tattoo--once on my chest, now on the floor of a bathtub.

This couldn’t be right.

Well, it turns out the scabbing of a tattoo can literally pull up the fresh ink of an unhealed tattoo, and my multiple showers had caused such substantial scabbing that the ink from my tattoo lifted from my body, leaving me with fleshy pink scar tissue in the shape of a once-majestic bird.

Three months later, I had my tattoo redone with three times the pain. Fresh scar tissue is not the best medium for tattoo artists to work on.

After feeling this excruciating pain, I made sure to go out and buy myself a nice bottle of baby-ass lotion.

Another couple of months went by, and I finally had a tattoo over raised scar tissue of a bird--a bird that I had doodled as a result of a boring lecture.

A couple years have passed, and I couldn’t be happier with my tattoo.

Granted, it’s not the prettiest thing, nor does it have any great profound life ideology, but nothing prepares me better for my impending day than thinking about my tattoo early in the morning.

It’s a testament to dedication, that nothing merits commitment unless you are willing to work hard to make it worth your time.

The best thing about my tattoo though?

It reminds me that I’m quite the fuck up, but somewhere along the line, no matter how shitty of a situation I get myself into, there are things or people out there that can make things turn out not so bad.

Call it spirituality, call it luck, call it a shaky inked-up tattoo artist with a goatee. I’m just glad that I live in a world that isn’t entirely unforgiving.