Misty's tattoo is a helpful reminder to those who may have forgotten her name.
OK, I stopped at the grocery store on the way home tonight to pick up some coffee. I don’t function well without my morning coffee.
So while I’m standing there, trying to decide if I wanted to try decaffeinated—not that the caffeine effects me in any way, but I was thinking, eh, what can it hurt? While I was mulling my choices, an attractive young woman pulled her shopping cart over and, evidently looking for one of those specialized brands on the bottom shelf, bent over and squatted down.
As a result of a high-riding sweatshirt and low-cut jeans, I was—along with the guy standing a little further down the aisle getting coffee filters—presented an unobstructed view of her lower back tattoo.
Tattoos are so normal today, even Barbie is sporting body art.
Now, I know that tattoos have become mainstream, and the odds are that every other twentysomething woman you meet may have one of one kind or another. Heck, I lived in San Francisco for 16 years. I’ve seen women with tattoos upon tattoos, punctuated with piercings of all kinds. So I’m not usually stunned by images applied to the body in indelible ink.
As far as tattoos go, this one was obviously done by a professional, as it has a sort of air-brushed quality, with scrolling and little stars and hearts, and a bit of pseudo-shadowing. But it was the verbiage that made this particular tattoo something worth discussion. In a nice script it read:
“A Gift From Me To You”
Mr. Coffee Filter did a double take and then stared a little too long, only breaking is gaze when she stood up. I would like to think I was little more subtle, but I did give it a good, hard look.
Long after she had found her Arabian Mocha Sanani or Sumatra Mandheling and moved on to another aisle, I was confused.
“A Gift From Me To You.”
What, exactly, was the gift? The tattoo itself? Was the idea supposed to be that this tat was so unexpected, that when reading it, the viewer would have to puzzle through this same thought, and therefore the gift is a brainteaser?
Did she run around as some kind of Santa Claus or Easter Bunny, passing out presents and then turning around and hiking up her shirt to show the tattoo to the recipients as a sort of reinforcing statement?
Or is it a private message to someone special; a note to her boyfriend, and the rest of us are just voyeurs?
I don’t know. Do you? Has anyone ever seen a tattoo like this? Inquiring minds want to know.
Lucky Ken.
I am going to start shopping at your grocery store