Tattoos I Have Not Gotten

by Adrianne Jeffries

2005: My best friend and I decided to get dinosaur tattoos. Me: raptor, inside of right wrist, in white. Her: brontosaurus (RIP) [or not?], somewhere inconspicuous, in black outline. We decided to think about it for a year and then get them if we still wanted them. I still do.

2007: I told my electronic musician boyfriend of two years half-jokingly that I wanted to get his stage name tattooed on my back and tried to get him to draw it on for me. He hated it. Three years later, he cheated on me, with a fan.

Around the same time, I decided it would be cool to have an anti-tattoo. I would get a tattoo of a date. When people asked me what the date signified, I would say, “It’s the date I got the tattoo.”

That same year, one of my friends had a bad breakup and tried to kill himself in the dorms. He took all his pills (and he had a lot of pills). He stumbled into another person’s room and they called 911, then he went to the hospital and they fed him a bunch of coal. I was thinking about him the next day at work and that’s when I started drawing this outline of a little black heart on my left hand between the thumb and forefinger. I still draw it sometimes and I feel like I wouldn’t mind if it were permanent.

2010: I move to New York City. I would write reminders on the inside of my wrist in pen or Sharpie. “Mail.” “Laundry.” Some tattooed friends noticed it and told me I should tattoo the words “to do” in cursive above the place where I usually wrote the reminders. We drew it and it looked really cute. Not long after I was actually physically in a tattoo parlor on St. Mark’s Place (called “WHATEVER TATTOO”) and I still couldn’t pull the trigger.

2015: A friend had temporary tattoos (nothing special, but they were 8-bit, left over from an event that had to do with video games) and I stuck a pair of cherries on my foot and the words “GAME OVER” on my forearm. The foot tattoo was hideous but the arm text looked neat. Someone told me I should get it as a real tattoo. I enjoyed looking at it.

20??: Two-year semi-permanent tattoos are invented. I get so many.

Photo via Instagram