In Our Forties, We Got Wedding Band Tattoos

Like most people in our living situation, a serventless household peopled predominantly by children and pets, my husband and I rarely get out together. Just the two of us. No kids.

And that’s okay. That’s the way it goes during your parenting years. We chose this life and we love it.

But that is not to say that when my mother-in-law called and offered a weekend of childcare and a night in New York City for our collective winter birthdays, we didn’t jump at the chance to get out of Dodge. We most certainly did.

Aside from Central Park, we don’t know Manhattan. Back when the kids were little, we used to drive into the city early on a Sunday morning, park at Columbus Circle, pack the kids into jogging strollers, and do a tour-de playgrounds all around the park.

But I have always wanted to take a map and simply walk the length and breadth of Manhattan. That, for me, is the only way to get a true lay of the land. Maps themselves do not come alive for me until I have walked the streets and gotten a feel for the place under my feet.

So that’s what we did. We took Metro North from New Haven into Grand Central Station, dropped off our bag at the hotel in Times Square, and just started walking. The sun was out, the air was oddly warm, and the atmosphere decidedly urban. This was just the ticket. It felt like a very long way from home.

We walked and we walked and we walked until we found ourselves, quite by chance, standing agape at the open threshold of Village Star Body Piercing and Tattoo on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village.

We are in our forties. We live in a quaint seaside village. We have kids, for God’s sake.

We looked at each other and silently said, “It might be time for a little rest.”

Brian and I have been talking for exactly a year (the conversation having originated at our birthday dinner last year) about getting wedding band tattoos, because neither of us wears a ring.

It was one of those unplanned, now-or-never moments. We walked in and told the guy in the shop, the walls of which were bejeweled with all manner of smoking apparatus including full-on gas masks, exactly what we wanted. And that was all it took. The next thing we knew, we were in the basement studio with our chatty, much-adorned (the Chrysler Building took up most of his right arm) artist getting our very first tats.

Fingers, evidently, are a difficult place to tattoo. Our artist told us the skin is extra-sensitive so the needle hurts a bit more than normal. And you obviously use your hands quite a bit in the course of a day, so the tattoos tend to fade more quickly.

We said we’d take our chances.

Yes, the needle hurts. It stings like a slight burn, like a continuous flu shot. But it’s a clean, brain-clearing pain that stops when the needle stops. It’s the sort of thing that folks of a certain mindset (ultra-distance runners, say) could easily get addicted to.

I’m thinking now of the Mystic Drawbridge on my calf. I could make it go up and down when I ride my bike!

An hour and a half later, nicely rested thank you very much, we were back on the streets, map in tattooed hand, hoofing it through the beautiful city on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon.

And my mother’s going to kill me….