We each had final hurdles to get over before we were ready to “tolerate” a relationship with a kind, available person, someone who knew that for a relationship to be mutually satisfying, each person had to consistently consider the other’s needs. That had often meant keeping my true thoughts to myself, and making myself small and needless, so that I didn’t ruffle feathers, or reveal parts of myself that might offend, or scare a man away. Before meeting him, my dating pattern had been to tune my antenna to the most ambivalent, or difficult, or damaged, or self-absorbed man in the room-or some cursed combination of those qualities-and then twist myself into a pretzel to become whatever version of me I thought might earn and keep that man’s hard won attention. Meeting Brian had been both a function of, and a furthering of, becoming truer to myself in relationships. The apartment we were staying in was directly across from the spot on East 7th Street between Avenues C and D, where Brian and I had met nine years prior. I was still elated, and self-satisfied for having gone through with my appointment. I awoke the next morning in the East Village Airbnb where we’d stayed, and admired my arm. But it was enough for the moment to enjoy it as my little secret. I wasn’t ready to tell my family about it quite yet. All my fears, all the drama from before vanished. I looked down at the words on my arm, and felt a rush of satisfaction. It was oozing ink, which she said was normal. When it was over, Minka applied Aquaphor to my arm and covered the tattoo with plastic wrap. But Emily insisted the degree of pain was different depending on the part of your body, and the inside of the forearm was one of the areas where it tended to hurt the least. It had hurt so much, he wrote a song about the pain. I had almost been scared off entirely by Brian’s story of getting tattooed on his left shoulder blade in his thirties-a hippie tattoo, “Mother Earth,” in the form of a pregnant tree. She had already assured me several times that the application of the tattoo wouldn’t hurt, at least not too badly. “You want to make sure you have energy and that you keep your blood sugar balanced,” she said. The next afternoon she was waiting for me in front of East Side Ink armed with a box of gluten-free cookies. She began her work the night before, talking me down from my fears over dinner and karaoke in Chinatown.
She joked that she was a “tattooula,” like a doula for people getting tattoos for the first time. My friend Emily-a much-tattooed writer I admire who is sixteen years younger than me-had offered to come and support me through the experience, as she’d done with other friends. I needed to pull myself together, not just for me, but for my “tattooula,” as well. I kept perseverating until five minutes before my appointment.