WRITTEN ON THE BODY

As we age, we're fighting a losing battle against memory. Maybe that's why, in my 40s, I've tattooed myself with everything I can't bear to forget.

- RUMAAN ALAM

J WAS THE COOLEST GROWN-UP AT MY FIRST JOB. THE place was a magazine publisher that felt like finishing school, lousy with women you could just tell had once owned a horse. If I was an outlier—not white, not born rich, gay sissy not gay gym bunny—so, too, was J, with her blunt haircut, her thrift-store shirts revealing tattooed arms.

I was stunned to learn that J was older than me, as though it had not occurred to me that one could be an adult but remain cool. J had a husband, an artist with a nerdy affect. His skin was covered with tattoos, many he’d doodled on himself. He’d tattoo me, if I wanted? I was a kid, trying to settle on what kind of person I’d be. Maybe here was part of the answer. Also, I thought him almost unbearably sexy. I wanted to be just like him, and just like her.

Weeks later, I stood in the kitchen of their apartment while he sketched out what I’d requested—a skull and crossbones, for reasons forgotten, if I ever had any at all. “It’s perfect because someday all you’ll be is a skull and bones,” he said as he ran the needle across my shoulder blade. “This tattoo will last until then.”

I was 22, maybe too old to have so little sense of self, to be so enchanted by the idea that I was now a guy with a tattoo, and maybe too young to know that permanence is only an illusion. When I heard, a couple of years ago, that the handsome artist who did my first tattoo had died, I remembered that moment, the dumb tattoo I’d chosen being interpreted as a cheerful acknowledgment of my death, the one thing in life we know is going to happen to us.