WILL JOHNSON
The Martlet (University of Victoria)

VICTORIA (CUP) — It could have been worse.

I could have a curse word tattooed on my neck or a naked lady on my stomach. I have seen some truly atrocious misspelled translations and smudged artwork before. Google “bad tattoos” and you will be inundated with hundreds of images of horrifying ink work.

So maybe I shouldn’t be too upset about the small tribal dolphin tattooed on my forearm.

I wasn’t drunk. I was just in a weird mood during a rainstorm on Koh Phi Phi, a tropical island off the west coast of Thailand. There are tattoo parlours pretty much every 20 feet and tourists flock in, drunk from the beach parties, to get Thai writing or elaborate dragons or some other cliché permanently etched on their skin. The places stay open until the early hours of the morning.

I saw one girl with the Coca-Cola symbol on her ribs. Another person got “Spicy Red Curry 45 Baht” tattooed across his shoulders in Thai. When I asked him why he had his favorite menu item on his back, he asked me, “Why don’t you?”

It was my second week in Thailand and I had been trying to say yes, trying to keep my mind open to new experiences. So when a chubby guy asked me in thoroughly broken English if I wanted to get a bamboo tattoo, I shrugged.

“Wha’ you want?” he asked.

“A dolphin,” I said.

My little sister has a dolphin tattoo, and that makes sense for her. Both of us were competitive swimmers when we were teenagers. I figured we could match. And you know what? I’ve always wanted to be the kind of guy who goes to Thailand and gets ill-advised tattoos. Now I am.

It was an interesting experience, lying on my back, watching geckos slither across the bamboo thatching in the ceiling.

“Wha’? You no cry?” asked Boom, my artist, while he repeatedly stabbed me with a sharp piece of bamboo. He smiled at me. When people look at the pictures, they all say the same thing: “You let that guy tattoo you?”

In the pictures, Boom has a frizzy mop of hair trailing in all directions out of his bandana and a sparse little goatee. He’s about half my size and he’s not wearing a shirt. Neither am I, now that I think of it. And then of course there’s the fact the guy is named Boom. At first I didn’t believe him, thinking maybe I was mishearing him.

“My name Boom, like Boom-Boom,” he said. Then he laughed.

So while that was a fun little adventure, now I find myself traipsing around town with a really fucking hokey, ugly, shoddy tattoo. Every time I lift my hand to my face or run my fingers through my hair or drape my arm around a friend, there it is: My little dolphin.

So while I’ve chosen to not regret it, as a matter of principle, I’ve decided that I’m going to laser it off. And even though it will end up costing me hundreds of dollars to get rid of, I figure it’s worth the price. This is my body we’re talking about, after all.

Some say I should keep it, to remind me of the experience, but I have a feeling it will be hard to forget.

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image: Will Johnson