“It Stands for ‘F*ck This Shit.’” Abigail Thomas on Getting a Tattoo at 80

Sixty. It sounded so substantial, so respectably old, a milestone, and I wanted to mark the place. Get a tattoo popped into my head out of nowhere. Perfect. I would get my first tattoo. It would be a salamander, because I love the way they look, and how they feel like a little puddle of mercury in the palm of your hand, and plus they are magic.

A young friend, Rachel, asked to come along and maybe get one for herself, so before we could chicken out, we dropped everything and hotfooted over to St. Mark’s Place right into a tattoo parlor. While we waited our turn, we stared at a young man who was having extravagant wings tattooed all across his back. It seemed a shame. So beautiful! Who would see it?

We wondered how painful this was going to be. “Do you think it will hurt as much as having a baby?” Rachel asked. I didn’t know. She thought for a moment. “Do you think it will hurt as much as a really bad farming accident?” she asked. I have forgotten her last name and what she had tattooed, but I’ve never forgotten that perfect question.

I’m getting a second tattoo in honor of turning 80. The whole phrase is too much to tolerate if it hurts as much as my salamander did, so it’s just going to be initials. Black, I think, a nice severe black. It will go on my left arm, because the salamander lives on my right. At first I wanted the font from The New York Times but it’s too complex. I settled on simple capital letters, like Scrabble squares. FTS. It stands for Fuck This Shit.

There are two tattoo parlors right in town. I’m going to the one that opens at noon because it says first come, first served. I arrive on time, but there’s already a wait, so I wander around, looking at all the options. There is a wonderfully menacing snake that could fit comfortably on my left arm, and there are delicate feathers in delicate hues, but I stick to my guns. FTS means something to me, the other images are merely beautiful. I adopted Fuck This Shit as my motto during the Trump administration and find it applies to something new every day. I’m next in line. The artist is a lovely young woman with black braids and tattoos all over her arms. She has listened carefully to what I want, and is off to make a stencil of the letters. I wanted to figure out what that vine is on her left arm, and those creatures, but she’s already gone.

I sit down to wait on a bench by the window while the little room fills with more young people. It’s a summer Saturday in Woodstock. A couple arriving on a motorcycle want a pair of tattoos like puzzle pieces that fit together, one on her arm, one on his. A young woman sitting near me is having a serious discussion about the pros and cons of getting a tattoo if you’re female and may want to run for president someday.

“The press would be all over me,” she says, “because I’m a woman.” Her friend points out that if the tattoo goes on her ankle she can cover it with a sock. Or on her arm, she can wear long sleeves. More discussion. As far as I can tell, this is not a frivolous conversation. We have come some distance if a young woman is going to defer getting a tattoo until she decides whether or not to run for the presidency.

The only tattoos I’ve seen so far are on the artists, who appear from time to time to see if anyone is serious about an appointment. Tattoos cover every inch of their visible skin. I wonder what it’s like to make art with such a limited shelf life. Maybe they also paint on canvas. The motorcycle couple leaves, deterred by the cost of tattoos when you add color.

The young woman is back to show me the letters she has made into a stencil for my approval, ushers me into the room where the work goes on, and points me to a massage type table where I am to lie down with my arm stretched out on a little extension. She asks me to take off my watch.

Then she transfers the letters to my left arm, and proceeds to tattoo them in. I don’t watch and I barely feel a thing and it is over in no time. I wonder why she is so quiet. It turns out she is upset because the ink of the F is blurred, and she worries it might not disappear. “Your skin is so thin,” she explains, apologizing, “Please come back in a week if it doesn’t look right by then.” I tell her don’t mind, and give her a big tip. I love it. The imperfection is perfect. Because FTS.

They are so young, these artists. Already covered with art. What will they do when they run out of canvas? When every square inch of their body is taken? Then in ten years or fifty they see a bird they’ve never seen before or a blue they have to have, or a green. What then?

I think I may go back for the snake, or the feather. Or both. I’m not running for anything. Or maybe I’ll just wander around.

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Excerpted from Still Life at Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing (c) 2023 by Abigail Thomas. Printed with permission of Golden Notebook Press. All rights reserved.