I have three tattoos: An eye of Horus on each ankle, and a KBO under my wedding rings.

I got my ankles done in my 20s. My mother had spent the better part of a decade forbidding me to get a tattoo while living in her house and then remonstrating with me that they are “FOREVER,” and errors would be indelible and so on. This gave me a lot of time to mull over designs and body parts. It was before the era of tramp stamps and still considered a negative in job interviews, but I never wanted a big ol’ sleeve of anything anyway, and I figured my face was problematic enough without having to deal with extra blemishes. When I was a toddler, my parents had a friend who had a tattoo of a fish on her hip that I found absolutely fascinating, but I also remembered that she would always take me off somewhere private to let me see it. It seemed like an expensive thing to keep under wraps.  I also knew my family ran to fat and sag, so all that geography was ruled out. And thus, the backs of my ankles became my spot of choice.

My dad was an Egyptophile and it rubbed off on me. My perennial favorite symbol is Ptaweret (head of a hippo, body of a pregnant woman, tail of a crocodile), but it seemed like too large an image for this project. Ankhs, on the other hand, were too generic. So I landed on the eye of Horus, or udjat eye, which is a symbol of protection, health, and regeneration. It is also supposed to represent knowledge. Plus, as the guy who did the needlework said, “now someone’s watching your back.” (This was handy when I became a mom; the kid was 5 before he figured out that I only knew what he was up to when my back was turned because he was noisy, not because I could actually see him.)  

I also knew I didn’t want any colors that might fade. A simple black image that would endure was the way to go.

So after I graduated from college, I was living in Los Angeles—and as a reasonably social creature, I spent nights wandering various hot spots with friends and dates. Some part of these outings always involved me dragging them along to scout tattoo parlors. I was not about to just hand some shmo a drawing and trust them to re-create it—my mom’s paranoia had infected me that much. So I went from place to place looking through books and scouring the design-laden walls for a template matching what was in my head. I finally found it at a hip spot on Hollywood Boulevard. Plunked down my $200—$100 per ankle—and had at it. The guy was very solicitous; told me that no fat means a more painful experience, but it really didn’t bother me after he advised me to stop holding my breath. (“I mean, you can try, but I’m pretty sure you won’t be able to do that for the full hour this will take.” I hadn’t even realized I was doing it.)

Honestly, it was a pretty fun evening. The guy was super friendly, my boyfriend at the time was encouraging, and when it was over, I had jewelry that I wouldn’t ever lose—unless someone chopped my legs off, in which case I’d have bigger problems anyway. My mom spent months telling me to rub the dirt off my ankles, but they are actually fairly unobtrusive. When people finally notice them, the first question I usually get is, “Why the ankles?” and the answer is “look how long it took you to notice them!” The second question I get is, “Did it hurt?” And I tell them, “well, a little, but not so much that I had to quit after one ankle…” And the truth is, it hurt way more when my dog ran through my legs 20 years later and gave me such a nasty rope burn that it defaced part of my art.

My other tattoo was an entirely different experience, and it has a much sadder ending. I wanted another tattoo, but again, spent a lot of time wondering what and where. Still a history nerd, I wanted something with a little more meaning than birds or dolphins. I still didn’t want anything too garish or large. I had spent some time thinking I wanted one of those white-ink UV-reactive tattoos that show up under blacklight, but I kept reading horror stories about them fading or discoloring. So, again, I went with a simple black. I finally settled on getting “KBO” on my ring finger under my wedding rings. “KBO” is for “keep buggering on,” the Churchillian phrase of resilience, and I figured that if my wedding rings ever had to come off for an extended period, it would be for some awful reason and I would need this cheerful reminder.

When my husband retired and we moved to Illinois, I got wind of the fact that there was a pretty talented tattoo guy in the tiny town where we had moved. Aside from my neighbors, he was literally the first person I met. So my husband walked me over to the guy’s house, and I stepped over some busted bricks and went up a flight of stairs to this little studio in the back. And for less than $100, he re-pierced my ears that had sealed up in my 40s and he decorated my hand with my abbreviation of choice in a lovely and legible script. It took him less than 30 minutes and I think he said fewer than ten sentences to me, most of which were about a horrific traffic accident earlier that day involving a bunch of high school boys, which— when you live in a town like this one, it is just a given that you either know the party in question or you know a bunch of their friends. His kids were friendly with the ones who had died or been injured. I chalked his reticence up to that. I went home happy with my new decorations, and I always waved at him and said hi when I would see him around town, but that was pretty much the extent of that.

Cut to last year. I was on vacation when a note went out over social media that two people had been found shot to death in their home in town. As I said above—it is just a given that you either know the party in question or you know a bunch of their friends. So there I was, halfway to Texas or someplace texting all my friends to find out if they were dead—and that is how I learned that it was the tattoo guy, who had hit a rough patch and handled it in pretty much the worst way imaginable. This event was not THAT long ago, and people reasonably close to it might read this post, so I don’t want to get too detailed on all of that. But I will say that it has given my own tattoo a whole other depth of meaning that I absolutely was not expecting when I got it. KBO is right.