Every Good Tattoo Artist Has to Start Somewhere

We’ve all seen them, the pictures floating around the internet that show a child covered in magic marker; she’s drawn on herself and she has a big smile on her face.  You would think that when a boy is six and a half and going on seven that drawing on himself would be, well, beneath him.  He’s got reams of paper around the house for drawing on after all.  But you’d think wrong.

I should have paid more attention to what he was saying but I was unloading the dishwasher and he started off the conversation with his usual “Mom, in my movie…” and that is more or less where I tune out.  I don’t mean to, but by God, this child talks about the movie he is going to make ALL.DAY.LONG and has been for the past year.  If he ever actually filmed the thing it would be longer than a Ken Burns special on PBS.  And my husband has told him repeatedly that George Lucas will sue him if he merely copies Star Wars.  So Snags recently renamed the title of his “movie” to Star Man (I haven’t had the heart to tell him that title’s also been used before) while leaving most of the characters the same.  It’s plagiarism with the tiniest twist.  Like calling your new book Barry Rotter and Barry’s got this lightening shaped scar on his forehead and he attends Hogwarts with Ron and Hermione…

So anyway, I was unloading the dishwasher and Snags said something about drawing some lines on his face.  I immediately thought of the cool tattoo that Chakotay sported in Star Trek: Voyager, but I told Snags that no, he could not draw on his face.  No, not even right before bath time where it would get washed off.  “Because,” I said, “it might not wash all the way off and then all your friends at school are going to be like ‘What’s all over your face?'”

Only… twenty minutes later and I’ve moved on to checking email on the laptop and here comes Snags.  He’s got a big smile on his face as he sticks his right arm out to me and pushes up his sleeve.  “Look, Mom!” he says, pen still in hand.  “Isn’t this like a really cool tattoo?” he asks.  And I look.  He’s written on himself.  He’s written “rase cars” on his right arm, and then “crash” on his left arm.  And that is what I get for letting him borrow a DVD of old Speed Racer cartoons from the public library.