ninanevermore

Today on my drive into work, I was thinking about the Cajun Queen I used to work with and the tattoo on her hip. Both tattoos, actually: one on top of the other. The tattoo on the bottom is the name of her ex fiancé. Since getting a lover's name tattooed on your body dooms the relationship to failure, she had to get another, larger, tattoo to cover it up once she booted the guy to the curb.

The first tattoo probably caused her to stay with him a little longer than she would have if it weren't there. There is a certain awkwardness that comes with starting a new relationship and having to explain why someone else's name is permanently displayed upon your ass. Because the Cajun Queen is normally a smart woman, I asked her what possessed her to get that tattoo in the first place.

It turned out she doesn't remember getting it. She and her fiancé made a trip to her hometown in Louisiana one weekend and, since Cajuns never drink just a little when they drink, she ended up getting very drunk while out on the town with the friends she grew up with. One of these friends just happed to be a tattoo artist, who agreed to do her a little favor while they were both 3 sheets to the wind. Cajuns are big-hearted when they're sober, and downright generous when they've had a few.

The Queen woke up the next morning, hung-over and vaguely aware that the skin on one of her hips felt a little sore. She looked over her shoulder to see a bandage about the size of her hand. When she pealed back the bandage, she found her fiancé’s name beneath it in large cursive script. Her fiancé thought it was great. All of her Cajun friends thought it was funny. She was slightly less amused.

"Did you yell at the guy who tattooed you?" I asked. "Are you still friends?"

"We're still friends," she said, "He didn't mean anything by it."

I argued that tattooing someone who is too drunk to think better of it is hardly a friendly thing to do, but she shrugged it off. Had it been me, I would never have talked to this person again. But I'm not a Cajun. Apparently, Cajuns have no concept of taking a joke too far. They love a good joke, and figure any joke should be allowed to go as far as it possibly can, even if the results turn out to be funny in a very enduring sort of way.

Eventually, she ended her engagement. She got rid of the man, but his name was still there for the world to see every time she bent over and her shirt rode up a little. It may as well have said "Property Of" above it. She started making plans to change this.

At first, she thought about having it lasered off. When she found out how much this would cost, she balked. She heard about a doctor who would do it for free, but only for ex-wayward girls who were trying to straighten out their lives to walk the straight and narrow.

"Do you think I could pass for a wayward girl?" she asked me.

I told her it would be a hard sell. She didn't have any gang tattoos, just one tattoo with the name of a guy that wasn't even all that tough sounding. Besides, she appeared too clean and respectable. Rather than wayward, she looked like a nice girl who had made two mistakes, one that she could get rid of by returning his diamond ring to him, and another that was more permanent than the bad relationship it reminded her of.

She decided tha getting another tattoo was the most affordable solution. After weeks of searching, she found one that she liked -- an abstract butterfly pattern that would perfectly cover the four-letter name of her ex. She came into the office one Monday morning to show off her new ink.

"Much better," I told her. She agreed. She and a girlfriend had gone to a parlor the previous Saturday night. She demonstrated how she straddled a chair, leaning her chest against the back of it with her derrière pointed toward the artist, who sat facing forward in another chair facing her and worked on her hip. Of course, she had her jeans dropped to expose her backside.

I should describe the Cajun Queen to you so that you can appreciate the rest of this story. She is a tall, willowy woman with long dark hair and big brown eyes. Though thin, she has what she calls "a bad case of Cajun Woman's Butt," that adds a bit of curve to her otherwise slender frame. It's not so much curve as to look out of proportion, but enough to give her body some verve from the going-away view that you don't expect when you see her walking toward you.

So there she sat, straddling a chair with her pants pulled down, while a 20-year-old guy sat with his crotch inches away from her curvy rear end. Not being so drunk this time around, she found the procedure painful and she started to swear.

"F-ck me! Oh, godd-mnit, f-ch me!" she said over and over while he worked.

At least for awhile she did, until the guy stopped and leaned back in his chair to catch his breath. It turned out, the words she was using were making things ha--, I mean, difficult, for him, and he needed a break. A good Texas boy through and through, he searched for a polite way to explain that this was a problem.

"Ma'am," he said, his voice a little high pitched and strained, "I'm going to have to ask you to please stop saying that."

The Queen's girlfriend began to laugh so hard that she almost fell to the floor. The Queen agreed to curtail her use of that particular phrase, and he manged to finished the tattoo while still maintaining his professionalism.

I bet that's one tattoo, out of the thousands he will apply in his line of work, that he doesn't forget for as long as he lives.

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