The art of regret

In Toronto you can always tell summer's arrived when you start noticing what a heavily tattooed city this is. It doesn't seem like you see much skin anymore without it leading to a sprawling script across someone's chest or a bright, solid sleeve down an arm.

But while it's obvious that tattoos are gaining popularity and acceptance with every year that goes by, there are plenty of reminders throughout the warmer months that tattoos still have a ways to go before they're barely noticed at all, if we ever truly reach that point.

I've heard stories of boldly brutal comments made about people's tattoos. Back in May, I had an exchange with a girl in who'd pretty much been told, by a total stranger, that she'd ruined her life by getting tattoos. Recently, I read an article in Bizarre's all-tattoo issue about a woman who'd been told she looks "grotesque," also by a total stranger.

Given that it takes time and energy and emotion to walk up to a total stranger, or to anyone, really, and say what you really think, I always believe that you must really, truly mean what you're saying in that moment to carry out that action.

And after hearing stories like those, I always think I've been pretty lucky that the most I usually get will be questions about my tattoos: "Can I see them? What do they mean? What do they say? Where did you get them?"

And then a couple weeks ago I was out grocery shopping when I got a different question. An employee who was busy stocking shelves stopped to ask, "So, you like tattoos, huh?"

"Yeah," I said. I was in a hurry, and I was getting my period, and it was hot outside. Not a good combination for talking to strangers. I just wanted to get in and out and back home, so I avoided eye contact and kept grabbing what I needed out of the dairy aisle.

"So, you're going to have those tattoos forever? Those are forever?" He asked.

"Yup," I said, still avoiding eye contact, a plan that I was quickly realizing wasn't working.

"I thought about getting a tattoo for a while, but then I decided not to. You always hear stories about people who get tattoos and then they get surgery later on to remove them, because they don't want them anymore," he said.

At this point I had what I needed in my cart and started to walk away. I didn't answer his question or follow up on his statement in anyway. I just wasn't in the mood for it, and didn't feel the need to justify anything to him.

But of course, as soon as I got out of there I couldn't stop thinking of all the things I would have/should have said to him.

It's true that people regret tattoos they get. But people regret a lot of things, and out of all the big decisions you might make along the way - buying a house, getting married, having kids, changing careers, putting your parents in a home, putting a kid up for adoption, having an abortion, quitting a job, breaking a law, getting divorced, breaking up, making up - tattoos, to me at least, aren't really all that big of a decision in the grand scheme of things. It's not the same as making a life or sharing a life or taking a make or break risk.

It's only skin, and skin is not forever: it's only until you die.

I tried to think of what bothered me the most about what this guy had said. Was he implying, or assuming, that I couldn't commit?

Was he saying that tattoos will naturally lead to regret? That inevitably we all change our minds?

Or was it that he was talking about my body itself? That I'd modified it, and now he was sizing it up, seeing the tattoos more as an accessory rather than something that has been forever absorbed into me, and that is now just me and not something separate.

I was, and probably still am, overthinking this guy's questions and comments. Maybe he just wanted to have a conversation. Maybe I should have taken the five or ten minutes and just talked to him about it.

If I had, I would have explained to him that I do have regrets, but that my regrets aren't in the physical, but in the emotional. I can't say what will happen down the road - we all change, many, many times throughout our lives - but I hope that my regrets are only ever in my head and heart.

I try not to regret too much, but it's hard. I regret my relationship with D.

I regret blowing off a trip to London with my mom when I was 18 because I'd gotten the chance to go with a friend instead, and was too self-absorbed at the time to care that she felt hurt about it, or to think of the excitement she'd felt towards it, the money she'd saved, the vacation time she'd set aside. (This, 11 years later, is still one thing I have trouble even talking about.)

I regret that I was so impatient in my early 20s to get a writing career off the ground that I lost perspective a lot of the time on the importance of personal experience and relationship maintenance. It's a balance that now, approaching 30, I still struggle to understand.

These are the types of regrets I hope will always carry more weight than anything physical. I got my first tattoo when I was 17 - a black spider on my shoulder - and while it's not something I would choose for myself now, I am still okay with it 12 years later.

If I've already committed myself to tattoos - many people talk about getting tattooed as making a commitment to it as a lifestyle - for 12 years and counting (I just got a new one this week), then I think I'll be okay for a while yet.

Not that the grocery store guy would know any of this about me. But maybe that was part of the reason why his comments struck such a chord. Just like the women I mentioned earlier in this story must have been caught off guard as well: how do you know someone's made a mistake if you don't know anything abou them?

Of course, this guy also wouldn't have known that I have had a tattoo removed before. Understanding all too well the lengthy process, and amounts of pain, time and money required to laser off a big ol' black and gray piece off of a very delicate forearm, I'm very careful about the tattoo choices I make.

Whenever people learn I had a tattoo removed they most often ask if it was someone's name. As if no one gets any other kind of tattoo removed.

It wasn't someone's name, but I will decline saying what it was because the tattoo itself wasn't what bothered me about it. The reason I got it removed was right after I got it done, about 11 years ago, a whole bunch of bad shit went down and I entered into what I'd considered at the time to be the second-worst time in my life.

When I started to get myself out of that time I felt the tattoo only reminded me of negativity and bad luck and bad people and bad everything. It had bad vibes and I wanted it off. I wanted to start clean and go back to the way I was. And even though I could never totally go back to the way I was (we never can, can we?), removing the tattoo was something I thought would help me at least get close to it.

And so I know about regret, and about mistakes. We all do. Whether they take the form of tattoos is up to each of us, but I know one thing for sure: the person I am now would be very disappointed to look back at this life and say they went through it completely unscathed and unmarked.