It’s a Thursday afternoon. I should be working. Instead, I’m in the back room of a tattoo shop in downtown Mesa, Arizona, sans shirt and with pants down around my ankles. I stand perfectly still beneath an AC vent that insists on pumping frigid air on my exposed flesh. The burly and bearded tattoo artist behind me, Jay Cavna, surveys his task from atop a three-legged, rolling stool. He maneuvers the thing back and forth and around me to determine optimal placement for each peony flower, cloud, and crashing wave. As he dials in my tattoo’s composition, Jay wields different colors of Sharpie pen to draw the background elements directly onto my skin. They have to fit around the already-applied stencils of the three animals comprising the bulk of the design. One hour later, I have swooping lines of blue and orange, yellow and purple layered upon each other in a cacophonous mashup. The resulting map is what Jay uses to outline my full Japanese back piece, a tattoo done in the style of Utagawa Kuniyoshi that stretches from the bottom of my neck to the backs of my knees. Yes, that includes ink on my sweet, callipygian backside. I’ll endure more than fifty hours in the tattoo chair over fourteen sessions spanning fifteen long months before the last peony flower is filled in and I saunter out of the shop with my first tattoo.

One doesn’t get a full back piece tattoo on a whim. I’d thought about it for five years, painstakingly researching possible subject matter (I changed my mind six weeks out, anyway) and artists, while only knowing that I wanted to get tattooed the right way. For me, the right way meant a traditional Japanese design covering maximum surface area so I could add on later. The only question remaining was whether my pain threshold could withstand the tattoo equivalent of a staggered half marathon. You can’t expect your tattooist to create a piece of art on a squirmy canvas, and just as important, you don’t want to be labeled a bad sitter. The minute your session’s over and you walk out the door, someone in the shop will ask your tattooist, “How did he sit?” I wanted to sit like a rock or a dead man or anything that is impervious to pain, but I hadn’t tested my limits in a long time. In fact, I’d grown quite adept at successfully sidestepping physical pain. I didn’t arrive at manhood via a grueling rite of passage. I’ve never found occasion to wear the bullet ant mittens of the Satere Mawe tribe of the Amazon. I don’t dine at T.G.I.Friday’s.

Despite not having any recent successful pain management campaigns to point to, I was confident that I would lie like a cadaver while still recognizing that what men think we’re capable of is both wildly optimistic and grossly inaccurate. We consistently overestimate our ability to do everything from throwing a football over those mountains to drinking a gallon of milk in one hour. That I had zero qualms about my ability to lie perfectly still while someone carved into my dermis for hours meant nothing in the final analysis, but blind self confidence was one thing I had going for me.

It wasn’t the only arrow in my quiver. If I should ever be writhing on the table and looking to bolt, I need only remind myself that nothing’s more sad than an unfinished tattoo. Except the person wearing it. I’ve heard of tattooers who, when tattooing dragons, save the eyes for last. They claim that it’s only when the eyes are done that the dragon comes metaphorically to life. No one wants to walk around with a blank-eyed, dead dragon adorning their skin. What’s more, half-completed tattoos are a tangible sign of failure. What example would I be tacitly setting for my young daughter if, every time we went swimming, I ripped off my shirt to reveal her father’s lack of follow through in the form of colorless peony flowers?

I also had my modest-patron-of-the-arts status to uphold. I support live jazz. I’ve donated to NPR. I buy the occasional art fair original work of art. When I ponied up the deposit for the tattoo a month before my first session, I wasn’t just saving a slot. No, I was entering into a tacit contract with Jay to see things through to the end. Composition is crucial for large tattoos, and I was making the man fit three large animals, plus clouds and waves and flowers, onto a funky-shaped canvas complete with curves, lumps, and crannies (see buttocks). His work was markedly front loaded, and my tapping out after a session or two would render his pre-tattoo toil for naught, effectively pissing off a man who would see me naked and was at liberty to divulge to the entire shop the relative size of my genitalia.

One last stumbling block for me was spousal buy in. I wanted sign off from my wife, Heather. God knows I’ve thrown the poor woman for a loop or ten through the years, so it seemed like the honorable thing to do. The most extreme change I’ve asked her to endure was when I pulled off a transition from steak lover to vegetarian at the same time I upshifted spiritual gears from atheism to Buddhism. I didn’t feel that I had to justify that one. After all, you expect your partner’s worldview to evolve. No one thinks the same way at forty that they did at twenty five, unless at twenty five they were already some enlightened yogi, or they didn’t learn a goddamn thing past the time they were old enough to rent a car. Existential proclivities are one thing; they can be discarded easily enough come sexy time, unless you go all Orthodox Judaism. Body modification, however, is a physical attraction minefield that demands ballet slippers when treaded upon.

The major physical transformation I’d undergone in the course of my marriage was involuntary, as my head of gelled-up, Pat Riley-inspired hair was reduced to just trace amounts of the stuff. The other biggies—a yeard (that’s a beard grown for a year, sans trimming) and a waistline that’s expanded, despite my sporadic stabs at fitness—could at least been viewed as correctable if you mix in a razor and/or treadmill. Getting the tattoo was asking her to catch another curve ball of the type that prompts serious introspection about the good faith contracts we’re bound by upon entering complex social relationships. Namely, to what degree can we voluntarily change our physical appearance when we’re in a committed relationship? We all want to look our best for that someone who’s promised to love us in thinness and in fat, but there’s only so much that can be done. Despite no longer being able to squeeze into the tuxedo pants I got married in (I refused to exchange vows in trousers that had already been to prom), Heather has yet to place my bags on the curb. If the waistline is free to expand a tad, I rationalized, what’s the big deal with one’s skin taking on a different hue or ten?

I never found a good way to broach the subject with Heather, so I just up and told her what I was planning. She gave me that this-is-just-a-phase look that one would give an eleven year old boy who states that he’s started training to one day break the motorcycle land speed record. That was fine with me, as I chose to misinterpret it as approval. When I’d show her pictures along the lines of what I was thinking of doing, she’d glance at them and say, “That’s a huge tattoo” or “Why does it go down so far?” She was commenting about them in general, not in the context of me getting one. If she’d taken my tattoo overtures seriously, I’d have heard, “That’s too big a tattoo for you” or “You’re not getting yours down that far, are you?” Whether she couldn’t factor me into the equation was simply a defense mechanism, I don’t know, but even when I told her I’d stopped by the shop to lay down my deposit, the gravity of what I had set in motion didn’t register with her. From that point, I just shut up and conveniently failed to mention it again. For all my honorable intentions, I took the coward’s path.

Maybe I thought I had a free pass coming my way because Heather had already taken her tattoo plunge many years before in college. It was a birthday gift from her brother, and the result is a three-inch long tribal gecko lizard on the inside of her ankle that we had since named Gordon. It’s so innocuous that I forget it’s even there. She bemoans getting it, and chalks the whole incident up to youthful indiscretion. Unlike her, I didn’t have an enabler when I was in college and thoughts of getting tattooed first crossed my impressionable mind. Working against me getting something of quality was that I had zero knowledge of tattoos, specifically, or art in general. Nothing speaks to my ignorance more than my conclusion at the time that the ultimate body modification would be a tribal sun tattoo on my shoulder. The image that inspired me was the engraving on the wood door of my favorite Tucson Mexican food restaurant, which undoubtedly makes me the first person to ever say that. Fortunately, fate intervened and I never scraped up the necessary funds to make it to the tattoo shop, so my college tattoo tale ends with me dodging a bullet.

Not everyone avoids the shrapnel. Dan was a guy I’d gone to high school with. Years passed until I caught up with him in a college humanities class. When I asked him what he’d been up to, he turned away from me and lifted up his t-shirt, flashing me his lower back and the asymmetrical, filigree-inspired tramp stamp tattoo that now resided there. Like a man just knows that women who drive Camaros are batshit crazy, my male instincts told me that what I was seeing should never adorn a man’s body. When he proudly announced that he’d drawn the thing himself to give to the tattooer, I shuddered but said, “Looks great!” I’m a terrible liar, but he seemed to buy it. I mentally labeled this encounter as a tattoo cautionary tale.

Months later, I had a similarly jolting run in with a tattoo whilst playing pickup hoops at the rec center. My old dorm buddy, Gary, sauntered up. We bullshitted about our recent, respective Christmas breaks. I’d gone to Prescott to be with my family; he’d spent his in jail after getting busted for possession of stolen car stereos. We agreed that, on the whole, mine was the better of the two. Then he asked, “Wanna see what I’ve been working on?” For the second time in too short a span, a man turned away from me and lifted up his shirt to reveal what was on his skin. This time, I laid eyes on the craziest thing I’d ever seen up to that point of my life: A snarling, contorting, and multi-colored Japanese dragon that wound across and over his entire back. The fact that it was only half complete didn’t make it any less impactful. I’d never seen that big a tattoo on one person. Looking at it gave me sensory overload. If he’d been sporting a complete Japanese body suit, my head might have exploded right there on the baseline of court #3. He said, “Drew the dragon myself.” I was still reeling, trying to take it all in, and now a cacophony of questions rattled in my brain: Do all tattoos have to be drawn by the client? What was the significance of the dragon? Was Gary now a member of the Yakuza? Before I could seek clarity, the in-progress game finished up. Absentmindedly, I ambled onto the court with four other men to challenge the winners, but my concentration was effectively shattered, and I missed open shots by the handful. At the time, I had no reasons to suspect that some twenty years later, I’d be trumping Gary with an even more ambitious tattoo and dropping my pants in coworkers’ cubicles just to show off the proof. (Sorry, Ryan and Dan.)

It was a Wednesday night when my wife and I turned out the lights in our bedroom. In the dark, I nonchalantly mentioned that my first sitting for the tattoo—outlining the thing—was the next day. I heard the crickets chirp outside my window before the silence was broken by a near-hysterical voice saying, “Wait, what? You’re actually doing this?” Then a pause. “I thought you just liked talking about it.” The reaction is understandable. I waited until I had survived thirty nine winters to get my tattoo. I toil in corporate America. I drive a Honda. Nothing in my history pointed to me covering the largest continuous plane of my body with a tattoo.

Turns out she wasn’t the only person I surprised. I was sitting like a rock during the grueling outline when Jay told me that a few guys in the shop openly questioned whether I was serious about getting the tattoo. I came off pretty straitlaced when I dropped off the deposit, and the prevailing opinion was that when push came to shove, I’d eschew the needle and skip out on my appointment. I asked Jay if he’d harbored similar concerns. To the man’s credit, he never doubted my sincerity. When I heard that, I grinned through the searing pain. Who knows? Maybe I’ll take a run at a body suit before all’s said and done.

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