A Quite Nice Tattoo - Grandparents.com

Hearts tattooed with "Mom" are so yesterday. Hearts that show the world you're a grandparent? Could this be the future?

Rosemary and I have been friends since we were 7 years old — 54 years, half a century, which is a very long time.

We met in second grade. We know things about each other. Most things.

I know that she likes P.D. James and anadama bread and operas and plays and museums and her husband, Richard, whom she met when they were both 14. I know she loves to garden and sew and knit and cook and sing and play with their mammoth dog, Goro (named after the matchmaker in Madame Butterfly). I know that her favorite television show is The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer and that she watches it every night. And, and if she is not home to watch — because she’s in North Carolina watching her grandchildren, or at the library or at a meeting of the Blue Star Mothers, or volunteering for a hospice — she tapes it.

I know, too, that never once in our life-long friendship has she ever even whispered the word "tattoo," never mind expressed a desire for one (tautological, yes, and tawdry on many occasions). But she says no, I’m wrong. “I’ve always wanted a tattoo,” she tells me. And when I ask, why, she says, “Because my father had one.”

I don’t say, your father had five o’clock shadow and a beer belly, too, because the deed had been done. She’s announced it in an e-mail: Forgot to tell you (I think) — I got a tattoo — three hearts, two blue, one red for each grandchild.

And she forwarded a picture.

“Yes, it hurt,” she tells me. “I winced a little but I have a high threshold for pain. Unlike you. You would have died,” she says. And I don’t argue. These are words I have heard before.

But not, “I’ve always wanted a tattoo.” She didn’t say this when we were kids and hung out at arcades where there were tattooed people everywhere. She didn’t say this when we were at the Brockton Fair waiting in line to see the Tattooed Lady. And she didn’t say this 15 years ago, when my Aunt Lorraine, who was in her 50s, got a tattoo on her ankle. I wonder, did aliens come down and steal my best friend and leave a look-a-like in her place? Or is this the kind of damage that hair dye and cell phones do?

How else does a Barnard graduate, who became a prosecuting attorney, end up at 10 o’clock on a winter’s night in a tattoo parlor in Key West?

“I actually went to a place in New York City when I was 30,” she says. “It was reputable. I’d read about it. But it was on the second floor of a building and it had a very small window. It was the kind of place where you had to knock and say something like, ‘Joe sent me.’ This made me nervous, so I left.”

And went home and waited 30 years.

Her grandchildren gave her the excuse she needed. “When I was younger, I wanted to get a rose on my back.” A rose, Rose? “Well, my father’s name, Johnny, was part of his tattoo, you know.”

Older and wiser now, this time around Rose chose three little hearts, two blue for her boys, one red for her girl (it was supposed to be pink) on her upper left arm because she says that’s the arm you’re supposed to use first.

“I’m saving my right arm for Mark [her older son] for when he has children,” she explains.

As if she can explain any of this.

“It’s really a quite nice tattoo,” Rose insists. “It’s discreet. Very high class. In good taste.”

“So do the grandchildren like it?” I ask.

“They still think it’s fake. My sister, however, was aghast.”

Aghast. Intrigued. Pleased. Flattered. Shocked. Tattoos definitely generate a response. Maybe Rose is onto something. Goldie Hawn got a heart tattoo on her foot when she turned 60. Maybe this is the future.

Young people wear their hearts on their sleeves. So maybe it makes sense that grandparents should get to wear theirs wherever they want.