Fourth Form of Madness

My husband is heavily tattooed. Seriously I hardly notice them any more, which doesn’t say much for my level of awareness, but to me they are just part of his skin, part of him. He just loves tattoos. I believe this love may have started when he was small boy living on a farm in New Zealand and he saw a tattoo on one of the shearers. My dear sweet husband said to the shearer “Wow you must have been really good to get that stamp!” I think the writing was on the wall from there on in!

When he is all dressed up in his computer nerd working clothes (hee hee) you would never even know he had ink. However, when we are say down at the beach there is no doubt. The last time we were down at the beach together I kept wondering why everyone was looking at us, we are no Posh & Becks. As I looked at my husband in all his tattoo glory; his two beautiful colourful arms both sleaved to the elbow, his heavily worked tribal chest and stomach, his proud family Celtic cross the span of his the side of his calf, the dragons on his ankles, the cultural significant hand tapped Borneo eggplant swirls and my favourite, his Japanese hand tapped warrior mythology piece, I started to see that they might be admiring the walking art gallery making his way to the water’s edge.

Not everyone embraces tattoos. I remember the first time I introduced my now husband to my father. Now for many years my father had been a detective and had seen a good many tattoo. To him tattoo had come to mean criminal – he couldn’t help it, the only tattoos he saw were usually on people he was arresting – I guess this faulty association factor was to much to refute in his mind. So in walks hubby glowing tattoos. At this point we had only been going out for around two weeks and my father proceeds to launch into a “what are your intentions with my daughter speech” in the most earnest of voices. I believe it was the tattoos talking!

Then there was the time that I was watching hubby compete in a competition. At some point in the wrestling action hubby’s top came up the people behind me said “Did you see that tattooed freak” or something to those words. At the end of the fight when hubby came to see me and give me a kiss, I chuckled to myself at the squirming people behind me. However, my favourite time was when I was waiting at the front of my house at the bus stop (how convenient for us) and started talking to a guy, that as it turns out, lived a behind us a few house across. We had been talking for a few minutes, I had established that he was, like my father a cop, he was very religious and that he didn’t like the noisy neighbours that lived either side of him. Now he didn’t know I lived in the house in front of the bus stop, that’s too bad for him, as he then started to tell me how he had been looking out his back top floor window of his house the other day(this sounds very Mrs Manglish doesn’t it) and had seen a tattooed, bearded bikie in the back garden of this house. He finished the story off with “Now we don’t want any of those kind of people living here”. Now I am not to switched on at 5.45am in the morning but eventually as I stood there mulling over what he said and feeling quite offended at his statement, it suddenly dawned on me that he was also talking about my husband. Now I am a quiet person but I have always stood up to people that bully or say detrimental things about others. Fuelled by the fact that this might be the only time ever I get to use all my sociology studies in real life, I launched into a sermon that started with “And who would be “those” people that you speak about?”. Needless to say he didn’t sit next to me on the bus when it came. I hoped to never see him again but a few days later he was at the bus stop that I was waiting at. We stood at apart, ignoring each other. Hubby must have been looking through the window and texted me “And then there was an awkward silence…..”

Hubby might be a tattooed freak, but he sure has a sense of humour!