My son's tattoo hurt me deeply

Put out the bunting, crack open the beers, stand there in the kitchen smiling from ear to ear, because he’s home – our student son is home and the family is together again. And after supper, after the washing up is done, the others – his younger siblings – drift off to watch television, and he says: “Would you like to see my tattoo?”

I say, “You’re joking.”

He says, “No, I’m not.”

But still I wait. Any minute he’s going to laugh and say, “You should see your faces” because this has been a running joke for years, this idea of getting a tattoo – the hard man act, iron muscles, shaved head, Jason Statham, Ross Kemp. He’s a clever boy. Maybe during his school years he thought a tattoo would balance the geeky glory of academic achievement.

His father says, “Where?”

“On my arm,” he says, and touches his bicep through his shirt.

His lovely shoulder.

In the silence, he says, “I didn’t think you’d be this upset.”

After a while, he says, “It wasn’t just a drunken whim. I thought about it. I went to a professional. It cost £150.”

£150? I think, briefly, of all the things I could buy with £150.

“It’s just a tattoo,” he says, when the silence goes on so long that we have nearly fallen over the edge of it into a pit of black nothingness. “It’s not as if I came home and said I’d got someone pregnant.”

It seems to me, unhinged by shock, that this might have been the better option.

His father asks, “Does it hurt?”

“Yes,” I say, cutting across this male bonding. “It does. Very much.”

For three days, I can’t speak to my son.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2012/aug/11/devastated-by-my-sons-tattoo

Best New Fiction, 2022

it ends with these lines:

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.

I am redundant. And that’s a legitimate cause for grief, I think.

"devastated"

Has this person been living in a cave? in my youth, tattoos were a much faded thing that some old men had and they often regretted. Things have changed. Even I noticed.

"I think, briefly, of all the things I could buy with £150."

like what, more bunting?

are you asking if they were living in a cave until 2012, or if they retreated and hid after the traumatic events of this essay?

wait so she never says what the tattoo is

narratively, that is like assaulting me in the face

reprehensible

The boy's mother was Billy Corgan?

Tracer otm, abolish the guardian

Its a bit of an odd reaction. I can imagine a mother thinking in a rather more compassionate way “I hope my son was in the right frame of mind. I hope this isn’t self-harm etc”.

But this is pretty explicitly “How dare he defy me and go against my wishes!”

I keep thinking of his skin, his precious skin, inked like a pig carcass.

Has anyone ever tried tattooing animals, I wonder? Not merely inking a number onto their hides, but going the whole hog (as it were) and inscribing them with full-colour renditions of naked women or the Black Flag bars or whatever?

Rolling What’s The Deal With TERF Island Thread

If you’d lost your arm in a car accident, I would have understood.

in my youth, tattoos were a much faded thing that some old men had and they often regretted

Sailors, Marines, ex-cons, carneys.

http://thefilmexperience.net/storage/1980s/afterhours.gif?__SQUARESPACE_CACHEVERSION=1428454166512

Picturing this image based on her reaction.

tbh i don't blame the author, i blame the Graun

God, I remember this when it was first published. What an insane reaction.

you all may skoff now, but this child with a tattoo ended up becoming PewDiePie

And the mother because Diamanda Galas

And the mother became Diamanda Galas.

Oh, please yourselves

If anyone could cause mother and son to fuse into PewDiePie, it's Diamanda Galas.

Christ, the DSM 6 just needs to reprint that for its definition of narcissism.