Frank
Nobody hangs pictures in a place they’re about to leave.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to. For most of my adult life, I treated my own skin like I was subletting it. Kept it neutral. Didn’t want to commit to anything permanent, didn’t want to answer for anything, didn’t want to explain myself to anybody. Renter mentality, even though I’d owned the property for five-plus decades.
First tattoo came in 2022. I was 52 years old. David Watson at The Tattoo Shop up in Forsyth put the needle to me for the first time, and something shifted that I genuinely did not anticipate. It wasn’t the pain, which was manageable. It wasn’t the art, which was exactly what I asked for. It was the moment the work was done and I looked at it and thought, that’s mine now, and there’s no returning it.
I’ve bought trucks I regretted. Bought equipment I sold six months later. Made career moves I’d undo if I could. But that first piece of ink sitting on my arm, permanent and non-negotiable, that was the first time in a long time something felt like a real declaration rather than a trial run.
I’m at seven now.
The Thing a Rental Property Teaches You About Yourself
When you’re renting, you patch the holes when you leave, you don’t paint the walls, and you make damn sure nothing you do affects the deposit. That’s not a bad strategy for an apartment. It’s a terrible strategy for a life.
I didn’t recognize that’s what I was doing until David was halfway through my arm and I realized I’d been waiting for permission to put something permanent on myself. From who, I couldn’t tell you. Just waiting. Like I’d get in trouble, or like there was still some version of the future where I’d decide I was a different person and need the slate clean.
At 52, I started doing the math on that.
Fifty-two years old, living in Gray, Georgia, same county since 1998, 28 years in IT, nearly 17 at the same organization, married to Kim, watching Lauren become a mom, watching Logan grow into a man. The idea that I was still keeping options open on who I was going to be someday, that was the most ridiculous thing I’d believed in years.
I wasn’t renting anymore. I’d been the owner for a long time, I just hadn’t acted like it.
There’s something about my brain, and I’ve come to understand this more recently, where I spiral. One question opens into ten more, one decision into a wall of second-guessing. What started as “should I get a tattoo” turned into “why have I been so hesitant to claim anything permanent about myself” and that question went somewhere uncomfortable before it went somewhere useful. I don’t think that’s accidental. I think my brain needed the concrete, irreversible act as a starting point, because abstract decisions I can second-guess forever. A tattoo already on my arm, I cannot.
The permanence wasn’t the scary part once I got there. The permanence was the whole point. It was the only reason it meant anything.
David’s done all seven of them. I’m not shopping around. The man knows what he’s doing, he’s in Forsyth which isn’t far, and I trust him. That trust itself is part of the same pattern, when you stop treating everything like a temporary arrangement, you invest differently. You don’t switch tattoo artists for a ten-dollar discount any more than you yank a fence post you just drove for the season.
Seven tattoos since 52. No regrets on a single one. Not because they’re all perfect, but because they’re all mine, permanently, and that means I had to mean them when I asked for them. You don’t walk into David’s shop pointing at a flash sheet on a whim. At least I didn’t. I thought about each one. Sat with it. Committed.
That’s the thing about decorating a house you’ve decided to stay in. You actually think about what goes on the walls.
