If tatoos are the worst thing your children do, be very, very thankful! It could be sooo much worse. My 19 year old son got his very first as a tribute to his mother. It is very classy, and covers his entire right flank so that it CAN be covered when it is appropriate to do so.
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Indelible Love: My Son's Tattoos and Me
Alec loves his inked-up arm, and I love Alec. So I've gradually come to respect his body adornment.
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My 21-year-old son, Alec, has beautiful blue eyes, but the first thing people notice about him is his right arm. That's because waterfalls, big cats, Buddha and a host of Zen symbols cover the entire limb. No unmarked skin shows from his wrist to his shoulder.
It started with the left wrist when he was 19—a tattoo of Tibetan Sanskrit wrapped around his lower, inner arm and finally peeking out just below his pinkie. By Christmas, three months later, his right shoulder was encircled with a large golden sun that hovers over a symphony of blues, reds and greens. Now Alec is known in our small New Jersey town as the guy with the tats.
And I'm unhinged. While I pride myself on being a rocker, baby-boomer mom (open-minded and astute like no other mom before me), I'm confounded by the rash, youth-driven choice that Alec has made—not just once, but repeatedly—and the permanency of it all.
At first, I cried. I yelled at him. I alternated between threats ("If you get one more tattoo, Dad and I will take away your car and your cell phone!") and bribes ("We'll give you $100 if you hold off on any more tattoos until you're 30").
Futile. He has defined himself indelibly with his tattoos. He will be pegged at first glance, no matter what else he accomplishes down the road.
Alec has a habit of thrusting himself into each new interest with blind fervor and dogged determination: when he was 14 he decided to get in shape, so he ran and ran and ran, gave up all his favorite foods and lost 70 of his 200 pounds. So it is not lost on me that his whole body could be totally inked by Labor Day.
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