Frank
It was 2022 and I was 52 years old, sitting in a tattoo chair for the first time in my life like I had exactly zero idea what I was doing. Which I didn’t.
I’d wanted ink for years. Decades, honestly. I kept putting it off for reasons that sound embarrassing now: what will people think, what if I regret it, is this something a grown man with a mortgage and a job title should be doing. All the things a person tells themselves when they’re more worried about other people’s comfort than their own.
Eventually I just stopped caring about any of that and made an appointment.
The Part They Don’t Put in the Brochure
What nobody told me going in is that your first tattoo is essentially a calibration test. Not for pain. Not for commitment. For your own taste. You do not fully know what you want until you have something permanent on your body and you either love it or you start quietly renegotiating with yourself.
I’m lucky. I love every piece I have. Seven tattoos in, and I don’t have a single one I’d take back. But I did make choices early that I’d approach differently now, and the difference is almost entirely about scale and placement.
I went big the first couple of times. Unconservative. Definitely not safe. Like I was cannonballing into a pool with reckless abandon. And I don’t really understand my logic there, but here’s what I know now: big tattoos age well. They don’t blur as much. They don’t really shrink into something unrecognizable. The ones that hold up over time are the ones that were designed with enough real estate to breathe. Go big, or go home.
What David Actually Taught Me
All seven of my pieces have been done by David Watson at The Tattoo Shop in Forsyth, Georgia. That’s not a small detail. Finding the right artist is genuinely half the battle, and most people treat it like they’re picking a restaurant.
The thing about working with the same artist over multiple sessions is that a vocabulary develops. He knows what I like before I fully articulate it. He knows I’m not afraid of black work. He knows I want things to connect eventually, not just sit there as isolated decisions on my skin.
If I could go back and tell 52-year-old me one practical thing, it would be this: trust your artist more and your anxiety less, and go bigger than you think you’re ready for. The piece that scared me a little before the needle touched skin is the one I’m most proud of now.
The Stuff That Actually Matters
When you’re this late to tattooing, people assume you’re going through something. A midlife thing. A crisis of some kind. Some identity scramble that needed a visible symbol.
Maybe. I’m not going to pretend I’ve done a full psychoanalysis on my own motivations. But what I can tell you is that getting tattooed at 52 felt less like reinvention and more like finally doing a thing I’d wanted for thirty years without asking permission from anyone. That’s a different feeling than crisis. That’s just overdue.
I still have room. The conversation with David is ongoing. The next one is already somewhere in my head, half-formed, waiting for the right reference image or the right day.
Seven down. Not done.
