Ink and the Impulsive

I’m not a sign. Not a template crafted by dreamers. I evolve. I change. I learn. Shy to some, outward to most, I leap more often first, enjoying the quickly earned spoils or analyzing the broken path in the dimmed light of hindsight. Uncertainty and self-criticism were once pillars, bookending every interaction, every thought, every movement. Now, they remain but no longer bear the load. I choose friends. Growing closer and further apart as time flows. I evolve.

Yet, I am an Aries. My right shoulder says so in simple black ink. It was impulsive. It was quick. It was more annoying than painful. It wasn’t particularly thought out. But it’s there. In plain speak, I wanted to be a big boy. Age 18 affords certain benefits. I didn’t smoke. I wasn’t planning on joining the military and it wasn’t a major election year (sorry Pennsylvanian State Senators). That left the most likely candidate as permanently mutilating my body by paying a sadist to inject poison into my young skin.

The place, a parlor named “Lefty’s”, was nestled on one of the few blocks that was not overtaken by the sprawling college campus that dominated the city. In the evenings, the sun bounced heavily off the trifecta of 30 story identical towers that housed the majority of the underclass population. The university’s buildings were mostly named after famed benefactors and founders. Past chancellors and remarkable alum. Their names sang of European wealth. Brackenridge and Sutherland. Peterson and Lawrence. Fitzgerald and Heinz. But, for the sake of the unremarkable, the three dormitory towers at the center of state funded academia were christened Tower A, Tower B, and Tower C.

From the flat rear patio of Tower C, you could see the neon shine of Lefty’s sign beckoning to the brave, the eager, and the bold. A small, metered parking lot stood between me and fate. Well, it wasn’t really fate. I just really wanted to do it. I didn’t know why, but it was going to happen. The plan was simple. Walk in for the first time with three curious friends, look at a book of pictures, and have...hopefully Lefty himself...brand me.

I knew my zodiac sign because of 5 minutes of research I had done before this excursion. I have had friends and family read out my horoscope after confirming my birthdate, but I never thought much about the mystical aspects of the exercise. Instead, I always pictured a sad, failed journalist sitting in the basement of a newspaper office. She was alone, stacks of papers littering her desk and surrounded by old, rusted filing cabinets that housed her life’s work. Thickly bespectacled and clad in forgotten fashion, she worked furiously on an ancient typewriter, crafting the future for the believers, the bored, and the dreamers.

I didn't much care for astrology. While my educational proclivities erred on the side of whimsy, historical fantasy, and literary mystery, I was not one for pseudoscience. I liked creativity, yet I craved proof and believed in fact. But, it was a predetermined symbol that represented me for some not so arbitrary reason that I didn't care to understand...perfect for a tattoo.

Aries are represented by the Ram, its symbol an artistic display of simplicity. Later on, my mother would comment that it looked like a visual representation of fallopian tubes; information I would have preferred to hear from someone other than my mother. As I flipped through the plastic covered sheets of a dulled white binder and came across the Ram, I wasn’t struck with a longing bond nor deep connection. I thought, “that makes sense.”

I never did know if Lefty was the one who marked me. What I I did learn was how my choice may have been something other than random circumstance. I leapt. I was eager. I was impatient. I was bold. My decision to get a tattoo without much thought while leading a group of interested, yet slightly scared friends into Lefty’s den was, in fact, an Aries kind of move.

Maybe I am a sign. Or at least part of one. I like to leap. I choose a head first approach. Yet, I have gained patience, learned to prepare. I can be calm. I can be spontaneous. I am loud, except where I learn to be soft. I am independent and I miss lost friends. I am an Aries...I guess.