Do you regret your tattoos?

I live in fear of regretting my tattoos.

Getting tattooed is really the ultimate test of fortitude for someone who constantly second-guesses their own decisions, isn’t it? It’s a way of saying, to yourself and to the world: No, I’m sure about this. I’ve thought about it, and this is what I want. On my body. Forever.

As a Visibly Tattooed Person, I get asked about tattoos fairly often, even though I wouldn’t particularly consider myself an expert. Most commonly, someone will compliment my tattoos and then admit that they’ve long wanted to get inked themselves, but haven’t yet come up with an idea they’d be willing to commit to for eternity.

And who can blame them? That shit is scary!

For this very reason, my first tattoo depicted one of the most timeless, uncontroversial things I can imagine. It’s a red heart.

That’s it. Just a red heart. Not even an anatomical heart, or a stylized heart. It’s a basic-ass, Valentine’s-lookin’ red heart, on my lower belly, at approximately the midpoint between my navel and my clit.

And I still love it, and I still don’t regret it. My reason for getting it was simple: it represented something that I knew I’d always believe in. I knew I would change as the years went on – and indeed, it’s been 9 years since then, as of this month, and I have changed a heck of a lot since then – but I knew that love was an idea I could always commit myself to. And I was right about that.

I got it done at a small-town tattoo shop by someone who was relatively new to the profession, so I should (and almost certainly will) get it touched up at some point, and possibly elaborated upon; we’ll see. But for now, I still love it. Its amateurishness is actually part of its charm, especially knowing I got it done at age 23. It looks like a child’s drawing of a heart. Like a young person grasping at the idea of love, trying to wrap her mind around it. That’s exactly who I was when I got the tattoo, and so it’s a perfect encapsulation of that time in my life.

Indeed, seeing tattoos as time capsules is an important element of how I think about my own ink, and I think it’s largely what keeps me from regretting any of my tattoos. At age 24, I dated a guy who was a few years older than me and had several more tattoos than I did. His were in much more visible places than mine were, too, which I found impressive. At some point, I asked him, “Don’t you ever worry that you’ll regret yours someday, or that they won’t feel relevant to who you are anymore?”

He explained that he saw each tattoo as a snapshot of the time and place where he got it – and of who he was when he got it. And to be fair, there are plenty of non-tattoo things about our bodies that operate that way: the scar on my knee from a hobby I’m no longer involved in; stretch marks from previous versions of me. Our bodies are inherently living documents of our histories; I like how tattoos make that explicit and deliberate (and colorful!).

With tattoos, a similar phenomenon happens to what I call the Blank Notebook Effect, where you buy yourself a very fancy notebook and then feel too paralyzed to write in it, because it seems that none of your thoughts could ever be good enough to justify writing them into such a glorious piece of kit. In much the same way, my first tattoo created a “once you pop, you can’t stop” effect in me – before I got it, I could hardly think of anything I wanted to get tattooed on me, but after I got it, the ideas flowed. And it felt more possible, more doable, more advisable, to get more and more and more – because I had broken the seal, popped the cherry, written in the notebook.

But I’m still fairly judicious with mine. I got one in 2015, one in 2016, one in 2017, one in 2018, one in 2020, and one in 2022 – and in almost every case, I thought about it for months beforehand, allowing me to decide that yes, I really, really wanted it on me.

There are tattoos that have taken me a while to get used to (perhaps none moreso than the giant Magic Wand on my thigh), but I don’t regret any of my tattoos at all. To the contrary: I love them. They feel like a crucial part of my gender expression and visual identity at this point. They make me feel hot, and cool, and more like myself.

In fact, it’s usually gratitude for my existing tattoos that makes me want to get another one. I’ll look at all the gorgeous art on my body, and think: what else might make me feel this good?

And it’s then that the best tattoo ideas start to percolate in my mind, until I’m ready to make them real.