I first came to the conclusion that my little sister was cooler than me sometime in the late 1980s. I wandered past her bedroom hovel and found her happily engaged in an elaborate dance routine with a stuffed animal that involved jumping from her bed to her bedside table to her bookshelf to her desk and back again, all the while singing tunelessly about a duck. She had contrived an elaborate turban for herself out of a silver scarf, and left a little tail at the back that fluttered behind her like a jetstream as she jumped about.
Thus began Ashley pushing the boundaries of fashion as her older sister stood in the doorway, leading from silver turbans to dog collars to barbed wire to straight jackets to pleather pants.
Bemused, I watched these developments with interest until there came a point where Ashley's fashion sense started to include poking more holes in herself than I had poked in myself at that age. This is when our parents started to think of me as the conservative one, the uptight child of their loins whose odd body modification habits ended with pink hair and dressing like a lumberjack when visiting grandma. I was slovenly and a mite odd, but nowhere near as odd as my sis, and the extended family started to invest more apprehension while approaching her looks than mine, especially as I seemed to eventually "grow out of it" and learned to wear pantyhose in very limited situations. Ashley, to her credit, did not, piercing and tattooing things with wild abandon while wearing assorted colours of black.
So it is to noone's surprise that my sister decided to get her third tattoo last week, an elaborate black and blue tribal star on the inside of her left wrist to celebrate her 20th birthday. What made our mother nearly swallow her wine glass, however, was the fact that I too succumbed to the draw of ink and let a strange man pierce my dear flesh repeatedly with a needle.
"REALLY? A tattoo? YOU? A tattoo? YOU? YOU don't get tattoos?!? Not YOU!?!"
Yes, me. After hemming and hawing about imprinting something on my body for eternity and fretting, like a good adult, about wrinkles and turning eighty and job interviews and my future children (who, it should be admitted, would scorn anything I'd do to my body anyway, because that's what children are for), and fretting about the sort of thing to stick on, and where it would go and what I would think about it next week or next year or when I was abducted by aliens sometime in 2030, I just went ahead and picked something and did it. It was surprisingly easy.
Of course, I had to follow my sister's excellent idea and imprint my own wrist too, like a copycat, leading to the two of us looking like a botched double suicide attempt:
And what sort of thing would an aspiring young print historian and bibliographer press on her body for eternity? Well, a fleuron, of course: a small, decorative printer's ornament used to break up a block of text or signify a start or finish. Appropriately enough, it ends my arm and begins my writing hand, a slight, stylized piece of ivy, the symbol of poets, faith, and bacchanalia.
I haven't told my mother that part. She's already scandalized enough as it is.
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