My Misspelled Tattoo

A story of hope

The worst thing to ever happen to you will not always be the worst thing to ever happen to you.

That is in part because it will likely be eclipsed by some future unknown terrible thing that you can’t even fathom right now (sorry about that). To be fair, even that thing will be eclipsed by the big thing that happens to all of us at the end of this thing.

But it is also, in part, because almost every worst thing that ever happened to me eventually turned out to be a good thing.

This is the story about one such terrible thing.

At 25 I found myself squarely in the throes of a quarter-life crisis centered around the brutal fact that my hardcore band had broken up. This may sound petty and trivial, but to me it was a clear and indisputable sign that I was not destined to be a famous musician nor was there anything particularly special about me.

I’m not a religious man, but I believe that I believed in the success of that band like young people at church camp believe in god.

We had embarked on a five year pilgrimage across America proselytizing our gospel to mascara-clad teenagers in strip malls and legion halls. I sang our hymns in bowling alleys and rec centers until I literally formed polyps on my vocal chords. I converted hundreds if not thousands to our congregation.

And then, somewhere near Salt Lake City, we realized that our faith was just a story that we had sold ourselves. A cool story, but the evidence laid out before us made it pretty clear that we were no miracle, nor were we miracle workers. Just some boys in a van convincing kids we were cool enough to sell them T-shirts and CDs, and every trip out felt like it was getting harder and harder to do.

So we called it.

The fallout was comically anticlimactic.

I moved into a big Korea Town art house I found on Craig’s List. For $450 a month I got a walk-in closet that I could fit my twin-sized mattress in, in addition to the space under the stairs that was just big enough for an IKEA desk and folding chair. I spent hours in there every day doing my Community College homework between going to the gym and going to work at an Asian-fusion restaurant on the Sunset Strip where I would regularly serve people living the dream that I thought I was destined for - slinging Chinese chicken salads for rockstars going out to lunch with major label A&R.

For me it was a fate that was worse than bad - it was average. Forgettable, uninteresting, and bleak.

When a young man is in a state like this he is particularly susceptible to the allure of one grand, performative gesture that he is sure can transform him in some meaningful way.

In my case, I was convinced I could turn it all around with a big fucking tattoo across my chest.

Now, I believe that there is still some mystery and magic in this world and while it is scarce it can be found in places like tattoo shops and on jiu jitsu mats and sometimes the ass kicking you get isn’t the one you wanted or deserved but the one you needed all along - and when I booked that tattoo appointment, I got exactly what I had coming to me.

There was a hasty exchange of emails and references, there were multiple stencils sized up, whipped off and then sized up again, there was the waiver - of course there was the waiver.

Then there was the sweet three hours of stinging, tingling pain that can only be escaped by thinking about how fucking cool you get to look for the rest of your life whenever you take your shirt off.

When it wrapped I squared up with myself in the mirror and from behind my shoulder I heard the tattoo artist say “damn, it looks like we just stamped that on there!”

He draped me in bactine and plastic, I handed him a stack of cash (plus 20%), and I headed home to get cleaned up for my shift that night at the restaurant that I planned on working, conveniently missing the top two buttons of my dress shirt.

When I got home I bolted up the stairs into the doorway of one of my roommates (a practical stranger who was working on his second novel) and I waited for him to react.

React he did.

At first in a way that I had hoped for.

Then in a way that no one ever hopes for.

At this point it is probably important to tell you that the tattoo simply consisted of six words, because at this point he had the unfortunate job of telling me that one of the letters in one of those six shiny new words was wrong.

One wrong letter in a text is no big deal. One wrong letter in a tattoo is kind of a big deal.

There was the feeling of blood draining from my face, of wanting to throw up from shame, and then from rage.

There was looking over the email exchange where I. HAD. SPELLED. EVERYTHING. CORRECTLY.

There was the realization that blame didn’t change the fact that I had a fucked up tattoo and I had to be at work in an hour and a half.

I called the tattoo shop and explained the situation to the artist who was remarkably unapologetic blaming everything on his apprentice (I guess that’s part of being an apprentice?).

He told me there was one thing he could do, but I needed to do it right away, and it was going to suck. Like really bad.

When I got to the shop he shuttled me deep to the back out of view of any potential walk-ins. He then proceeded to blast over my hours-old tattoo with a mixture of salt water, lemon juice and vaseline - just the one letter though.

He told me to do everything you are not supposed to do to a new tattoo - that the skin would start to reject the ink and to pick any scabs that started forming.

He said we’d do this every two weeks until the wrong letter was just a cloudy scar, then we’d blast over it with the right one.

I then got in my ‘91 Nissan pick up and drove directly to my closing shift at the restaurant where I was going to tell no one.

Let me tell you - everyone has a thousand problems until you have a misspelled letter tattooed on your chest - then you only have one problem.

All previous failures - the band, the shitty job, the remedial community college classes and sleeping in a literal closet - they didn’t feel like problems compared to the immediate problem tattooed into my chest.

Over the next two months I diligently met with my tattoo artist for our bi-weekly torture session. In those two months I carried so much shame for that problem that I made, it felt unbearable. It seemed like I was the kind of person who just made problems for myself over and over again, but when it was over, and when he finally put the right letter back in - I was someone different.

I was the kind of person who can endure terrible things to fix my problems and become a better version of myself because of it.

Two months after all this I finally moved out into my own apartment. Two and a half years later I got into Berkeley and two years after that I graduated with honors. And 18 years after what I thought was one of the worst things that ever happened to me, never (and I mean never), has a single person noticed the smudge in the tattoo on my chest. But it does remind me of what I was capable of surviving to fix it.