He told his mama they were drawn on with a Sharpie. They were not. Nope, these three lines are a good ol' stick and poke tat. You know, a jailhouse tattoo.
Now, I'm already giving thanks that these lines didn't actually happen behind bars, but come on!
"They get better the longer they are there," he said.
No. They do not, and I have proof. Somewhere.
Since then, I've been rummaging through picture boxes and photo albums looking for pictures of my daddy with his shirt off. My dad died when E was just 2, so he doesn't have a lot of memories of him. As we talked about his tat, I realized that my boy was not aware that his beloved Papa, the man who owned the guitar that got him started picking, had a couple of humdingers of jailhouse tattoos.
I'm not sure whether dad's tats were received behind bars, but Lord knows they could have been. Regardless, I'm fairly certain they were delivered under the influence of moonshine, home brew or cheap liquor. Why else would you have two words poorly inked above each of your, um, nipples?
"Sweet." and "Sour."
Go ahead. Laugh. We did.
E "busted out laughing" when I told him about his papa's tattoos. I put that phrase in quotes, because you might not recognize it. That's Southern for "guffaw."
Anyways, based on the experience of my dad, I can tell the boy that his three lines will not improve with time. Instead, they wrinkle and turn the color of bread mold. I'm still searching for photo evidence to support my assertion.
So far, the photos I've found are so faded that you can't tell there's anything on my dad's chest at all. I did find a picture of me sitting on his shirtless shoulders, my legs covering up the offending words. I have a Polaroid Instamatic photo that was taken with a flash so bright that all you see in the now-faded picture is a field of amber where his tattoos should be.
Those pictures have been good medicine. I have laughed out loud looking at them and found myself getting carried away looking at more. There's a picture of my great grandfather's second wife, looking so much like Dorothea Lange's Grapes of Wrath, Depression-era Dust Bowl Migrant Mother photo that is so famous. Only in this one, there's a fellow with a grin-and-a-half pointing a revolver at her. I mean, that's what people did back then when they had a camera, didn't they?
That picture also makes me a little sad. It captures a point in time that I'm not sure pictures will catch anymore. The people in them have faded from the memories of anyone who could tell me about them. I have no idea who the man holding the gun is, but I want to.
So, here's my last bit of inspiration for September: Take out your old photos. Sit down with the oldest person you can find, and have them tell you about them. Make notes on the back. Write down names and places and stories. You think you'll remember them later, but you won't, not without the notes.
I wrote on the backs of some of the photos I found, but there are many, many more in the box that are nameless faces, each of which, I am sure, has a great story, much like the stories that I don't know about my daddy's tattoos or my boy's ring of ink.
I'm still not a fan of the tattoo, but I am hoping that one day he'll tell his kids the story of how that ring came to be, and, that, 50 years from now, they'll find a photo of their daddy's hand and laugh about our discovery in The Cheesecake Factory.
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