Journal: News & Comment

Start me up

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My wife and I have our tenth (!) wedding anniversary this Friday. (I shouldn't be so surprised—our oldest daughter turns eight at her next birthday.)

For more than a year now, we've been talking about getting tattoos to celebrate the occasion—not necessarily on that day, but sometime in the near future, as a marker of 2005 as the beginning of our second decade together. We discussed various options, whether we should get matching designs, and so on (nothing huge, something symbolic, no umlauts), but my wife—as with many things in our household—is taking the initiative to have a consultation, though not the procedure, with a tattooist tomorrow.

It looks like we'll have different designs whenever we get them done. She has a particular piece of bee artwork (from our dinnerware pattern) that she loves, while I'm partial to some stylized version of Pisaster ochraceous, the purple sea star common up and down the west coast of North America, referring both to when we met as park naturalists running seaside nature programs in 1988, and to my marine biology degree.

I'm quite partial to the diagrammatic drawings in the classic invertebrate zoology textbook, Buchsbaum's Animals Without Backbones (my high school biology teacher waxing poetic about "Buchsbaum! Buchsbaum!" still rings in my ears), so perhaps whatever I do get will resemble those. It may be a few weeks for me yet, but I think my time is coming soon. Tattoos are no longer illicit in our society, but they remain permanent, and I take this seriously. I almost never take off my wedding ring, for instance, but this will be something I both won't need to, won't want to, and won't be able to remove. This is not a whim, so the design I choose will need to be right. I'm excited.

When our two children are old enough to be legally allowed to have tattoos, it will be more difficult to dissuade them, however.

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