Do not tremble too fiercely at the sight of such well formed and perfect legs... I am just a man. Indeed, there is no dearth of shredded dudes with washboard abs and jacked arms toddling around the world on toothpicks and chicken skewers - or even those sensible fellows who reluctantly undertake a 'leg day' every week only to end up with great quads and then find out that genetics has denied them the ability to develop calf muscles.
Do not weep for them those poor wretches. I shall remember them in my prayers.
(The cosmos is not without justice however, my gifts are only the inverse of theirs. I pay in kind for every single beer I pour down the hatch and the gods know I have vanquished many, many beers)
So yeah, nice legs... and ripe for inking.
I have four now (tattoos not legs). Not nearly enough, no, but four more than my late father ever intended. He who I disobeyed, betrayed and failed in all things (A Song of Ice and Fire enthusiasts have now been rewarded with our secret handshake of an in-joke).
The last decree of my father's that I broke was also the one longest obeyed. No goddamn tattoos, Morgan, not ever. I need not tell you why he felt this way because the math is good that someone in your family of that generation felt the same and I don't begrudge him that, not at all. In most of the other ways that mattered, he was all compassion and tolerance. Here was a man that wept openly at every Remembrance Day ceremony (Murrikans call this something else), who chastened and chastised me every time I brought home from school a tasteless joke about blacks or jews (or whichever group was the focus of moronic disparaging that month) and who for a blue collar guy with little education, kept a remarkably open mind about religion and spirituality. A good man. A great father.
(Full disclosure, this saint painted above was only meat and bone like the rest of us. He had a distinct problem with homosexuality. He was poor, fatherless and vulnerable as a youth, in a dark town and during a time in history when most gay men were relegated to the shadows and forced into the parks and public bathrooms of a city gone seedy (and no, not because of them))
I was flagrantly disobedient as a kid and never bothered to be subtle about my sinning... the unwritten rule about our house was as long as my academics remained unscathed and they (almost) never had to bail me out of jail, then all bets were off and any degree of drugs, debauchery, sex and rock 'n roll was forgiven automatically, if even given consideration in the first place.
But somehow the tattoo rule remained sacrosanct... important to him for his reasons, important to me because it was the one wrong I never rubbed in his face.
But fuck me, was the lure of temptation ever strong! Eventually I buckled and succumbed to the call of ink (long after my rock music/band pursuits of over a decade evaporated and long after I locked down a 'respectable' job in the court system) and I visited a front for the Hell's Angels that held itself out as a tattoo shop.
I received an extremely poorly done Union Jack flag on my forearm (filled in with a liner), which I have not had the heart to fix or cover up. That isn't important. Worthy of mention is that my father would be dead barely a year later, so naturally I often regret not keeping my powder dry for another 12 months.
Another regret. I add it to the pile.
So last night I had number four done and this is the happiest that I have ever been with piece, which as you all know, is a great thrill and enduring pleasure... however, not without a bitter sweet aspect to it.
So the story goes...
In the part of the world that my family hails from and in the part of the world where it settled, a typical aspect of a middle-class childhood is that a great emphasis is placed on swimming lessons and recreation on the water. It was believed that every kid had to be a confident, competent swimmer at the very least, and if possible, also be versed in boat safety and the basics of handling a craft.
I tell you this, because as I have never been either athlete or sailor, it should have been impossible for me to ever find myself in any kind of danger in/on/near the water... let alone so many goddamn times over the course of my life.
One of my earliest memories is of my father pulling me out of a pond on the English moors. I'd gone in headfirst, swallowing as much water as possible in the murky depths and he had caught hold of my ankles and heaved. There'd been nobody about for miles and miles so I suppose it was a lucky save for us both after he had beaten the water out of my chest and wrapped me in his coat.
This is a memory that would flash oddly to mind after the boat I was on went down face first into a funnel on the Owl River while I was white water rafting many years later. A calm voice in my head reminded me that it was inevitable that the inflatable boat would be spat out again, but in the meantime I was in the prow and hadn't breathed for what seemed like an eternity. I must have been turning blue and all I could think about were my father's hands, an ocean and a lifetime away.
A few months before my father shuffled off this mortal coil, I was swimming on a hot summer's day, when my drunken foolishness found me further out to sea than I had realized or intended. Realizing my situation, I began to head back to shore. I grew winded more quickly than usual and stopped to rest and gauge my situation - my heart sank, I was even further out from shore than when I'd started! Redoubling my efforts I tried to escape again, swimming as hard as I could for sure, which is when I truly felt the undertow... the current was so powerful that it felt like fingers clawing at my calves. I stopped and started treading water. South and east of me was open water and to the west were jagged rocks that I was being dragged towards (if I even made it that far alive). Dignity fled and I waved my arms and shouted to my then girlfriend on shore, to anybody really, but no one noticed. My mind was drenched in the trauma of it... panic gave way to something stranger... perhaps even the beginnings of acceptance? I imagined my father's blind fury that I had fucked it all up and worse, done so in the water. No excuses. No brothers or sisters to lend comfort to anyone.
A kid messing around on his floater with a paddle, so far away from me that he shouldn't have seen me, let alone noticed my plight, locked eyes on me and started gunning it towards me Baywatch style. He pulled me over his inflatable and kicked us back in what seemed like no time.
Rising from the waters and stumbling ashore, aided by that athletic young man of good will, I sought the comfort of my girlfriend and her family, but there was none, they were completely oblivious to my plight.
From my cooler bag I pulled my last two bottles of beer - Russian Imperial stout that had no place on a fucking beach. I am strange.
I walked them over to my saviour and proffered them. "Not every man knows what his life is worth," I said. "Mine is apparently valued at two beers. Thanks."
There is a lesson somewhere in all this and for the civilized man, that lesson is not to mix alcohol and water sports.
For the paranoid primitive, however, the truth is just as plain... the universe wants me drowned...
...but I am goddamned waterproof.
Somewhere along my development as a creature of symbol and circumstance, these haunting memories dovetailed with nostalgic sentiment for a favourite sea creature of lost childhood, the sea horse.
What is not fascinating about a being where the male gives birth to the young?
What is not powerful and evocative of the silhouette that was always equated with travel and adventure?
It is no random happenstance that found the seahorse emblazoned on the sailor's maps of old... no accident that it appears even in the ancient heraldry of even landlocked kingdoms.
Long have I yearned to take this symbol for my own... on the never ending list of tattoo ideas, this one was always floating near the top.
My name is Morgan and one of the literal translations of it is 'of the sea' or 'seafarer'
I have not travelled nearly as widely as I yearn to, but here is the sigil of all the journeys to come that I lust after... the roads untrodden... YET.
And now I get to wear it, thanks to the talents and vision of one Alex Snelgrove of The Okey Doke Tattoo Shop in Toronto.
I am waterproof, the sea wants me but cannot have me.
Like George R.R. Martin said:
Priest: Let <person> your servant be born again from the sea, as you were. Bless him with salt, bless him with stone, bless him with steel.
Response: What is dead may never die.
Priest: What is dead may never die, but rises again, harder and stronger.
Hopefully I remain undrowned by the time the next fucking book comes out...
