Emma has a new friend. While she was updating him on the events of this trip, he responded to the following story by acknowledging us as two “gangsters” but it kept autocorrecting to “hamsters” and we both liked it A LOT. The following Emma Essay Series will refer to us accordingly.
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At this very moment, there is a man at home in Copenhagen who doesn’t particularly want to be there. I don't get the idea he ever wants to be anywhere at all, but especially not here, not now, and certainly not after forfeiting a planned year in the tropics to the pandemic.
He skews towards a slightly more approachable male version of Lisbeth Salander, even though I KNOW SWEDEN IS NOT DENMARK. 2011 Rooney Mara version, as he's tall. He's sinewy with a shaved head and tattoos splattered across him like a Pollock. Despite a rather intense exterior and primarily black wardrobe, he is quite kind and quite patient, and also the kind of person who when you announce your plans to, he will neither confirm nor deny interest, but will show up anyways. This is Kim, “….like Kardashian.” If you ex-ray through a left combat boot and hone in on the outside of his ankle, you will find a poorly executed tattoo of a depressed but trying smiley face.
On a Tuesday evening in Canggu, Kim permitted two strangers with no prior experience, nor tattoos themselves, to scar him quite literally for life. As you may have deducted, the only strangers capable of this level of premeditated masochism are Ms. Emma Louise and yours truly.
We rolled into Canggu earlier that day to the propaganda of me announcing this leg of the trip would be the best. Not to set any inflated expectations, but it was a scoreboard situation. You always come back to Canggu. We spend the afternoon at La Brisa and see our alarming first nude-colored bikini situation, experience deep and disgusting heat, and opt to slip in and out of our personal pool with giant leaves at leisure. We watch make-up tutorials like teenagers and enjoy our sophisticated apartment with industrial air conditioning and space. We settle on dinner plans at Deus for mexi grub and people watching. On the way there I buy a dress at SIR that will prove to be a life-changer. I wear it out of the store.
We get to Deus, and take a lap to acquaint Emma with the famed Temple of Enthusiasm. High ceilings, graffitied street art exhibits, archived surfboards and their reflections on the polished concrete like a technicolored fence. Glossy custom motorcycles in taxi yellow, ox blood and pitch black, jacketed in embroidered leather and rivets. Rows of perfectly sorted t-shirts in grays and reds and blacks, branded from sister stores in Milan, Tokyo, and Los Angeles. Prints of girls in bikinis on bikes. A store for dudes.
It’s Tacos and Tattuesday, a weekly event where buying a taco plate qualifies you for a free tattoo. The artists, local guys who chain smoke cigarettes, set up a few stations with guns, oddly placed saran wrap, and tip jars on what are regularly guest dining tables. In a window by a display of select rings for bad boys, Emma and I snoop in on a session, much like puppies in a window. We see Kim, who we don’t know yet, get a landscape of Malaysian valley carved into his forearm.
“Whaaaaaaaaat issssssss this place….”
We watch for a minute before deciding we are famished, circle the perimeter and settle on an outdoor table for four, for two. We sit for a feast of tacos plates and nachos and quesadillas and chips and salsas, slugging watered down 2-for-1 margaritas and the supplemental insurance tequila shots. Nothing says opulence like many beverages on a table, which if I haven't established thus far in my writing, the time is now. Minimum three.
The sunset is lilacs and cotton candy pinks. The most incredible reggae plays. I Shazam shamelessly, Emma cutting me off with accurate song names before the application can compute, drafting me into a trivia game, against her, I did not sign up for. We are grooving in our chairs, too and from our way to the restroom, and by the end we'll be speaking directly with the DJ.
We are having an absolute ball and I think I may be selling Emma on Canggu. As happy hour cut off approaches - we wave over the waiter to top us off, twirling the international “another round" hand signal. He rodgers the situation. But we aren't done. "Actually our glasses of ice are melting!" He returns with ice. "Could we order a couple more tacos?" He returns with menus, then again for the order. "Some extra salt, please…..!" The poor thing is bouncing to and from our table every 4 minutes and I see a single bead of perspiration developing on his left temple. Also - is he kind of cute? We get his name; "Rexi." We begin to hit on him. This organized crime and intentional chaos says to me - we are finally getting the level of attention we deserve.
As the concert of tequila and endless hard tacos twirls in the trade winds around us, Emma clocks who we will come to learn, is Kim. He is sitting on his own, contently chowing down with his mandatory taco plate. His black shirt prints displays a white font with a telling personal advertisement of “BAD VIBES.” He looks peaceful and happy to be alone.
“Tay…. look over there. It’s that guy who got the tattoo.”
“Oh, yeah. So wild huh.” (I’m eating)
“We gotta talk to him…”
We turn around to both look at him. Emma pipes up.
“HEY…. BAD VIBES.” (nothing)
"BADDDD VIBESSSSS!!!!”
He finally hears her, over the duppy bass of the DJ booth he is sitting directly behind and kind of inside of. Not concerned in the least with personal boundaries, Emma invites him to come sit with us - straight out the gate. He conveniently "misses" the "offer" in the shuffle, and ends up hovering in an unfortunate and awkward distance for about 5 minutes while we pelt him with a barrage of questions, wearing him down. Recognizing how absurd the current set-up is for conversation, he relents, asking if he may join. “YEAH THAT WAS THE FIRST QUESTION WE ASKED YOU.” Kim will accept that he is outnumbered, out attituded, and not to undermine the inclusivity of Bay Area girls. After introducing himself by the first name as the most famous and controversial of our nation's first family, which is off-brand-ly remarkable and refreshing, he gathers his taco plate and beer to come sit with us.
The topic is obviously tattoos. What else is there? We start with the one he just got. The landscape he just visited and its magnificence. We walk through the ones he has and what they mean. The angel on his back, the sequoias and tent from camping in California. His favorite, the palm stretching up his shin, and his least favorite, also the angel. Good tattoos and bad. Emma makes him take off his shirt in the restaurant to finally show us this damned angel, he's mortified, fights it, but complies shortly after (foreshadowing). He reveals he has his own tattoo gun at home - a notion to keep costs at bay as he renders his own body a canvas to rival Matty Matheson's. He brings the thing to weddings and sets it up next to the dance floor.
We discuss Kim’s waning necessity to have perfect tattoos. We understand him completely, likening it to, “Sometimes I get a manicure I don’t like, and it kills me to look at for the week!” He is likely insulted by the parallel and probably hates us a little bit, but feigns entertainment of the idea for the sake of consenting to friendship. He’s loosened up on his thought process on the matter over the years, admitting to not liking, at times, a majority of whats on his body for one reason or another. He’s relaxed to the point of “complete strangers could tattoo me and I wouldn’t mind. Like, you two or something.”
Before he has finished the last sentence, I know he is absolutely getting a tattoo from us tonight.
A few things must first take place:
1. We have to decide (on the tattoo)
2. We have to wait (for a line of people to clear)
3. We have to bribe (a tattoo artist to use gun)
4. We have to learn (how to tattoo)
5. We have to tattoo (a man)
Step 1 is cleared almost instantly. “So if we did something simple, small, barely noticeable - two small dots even, you would actually let us do that? Really?” “Uhhhh. Yeah. Maybe make it a smiley face or something.” We sketch up a drawing on my phone’s notepad (see below). The design is motioned, seconded, and voted on unanimously for approval.
Step 2 strategy involves waiting out the queue of people getting tattoos and striking in the aftermath, when a gun opens up and the team is too exhausted to tell us no. Two hours passes while we drink and smoke cigarettes, dancing with the devil, aka not accounting for the possibility of exhaustion happening to us.
Step 3, the negotiation, begins with a “NO.” But, if you know Emma, a “no” is a only a differed yes. Her initial ask is to one of the artists, a squatty toad of a man with a cigarette that hangs out of the side of his mouth. She asks him directly if we can use his equipment to tattoo our friend and receives the hardest pass. She returns to our table to relay the unfortunate news. I smile at Kim, shaking my head. I whisper to him “Watch this.”
With a confidence I will never know nor understand, Emma chalks up the veto to a simple language barrier. She believes the world wants to help her. She also has the endurance for debating and is frighteningly convincing. From what I understand, sometimes she jumps first to make her point in a negotiation before having a plan of what she'll say - but the sheer force of language that escapes her, quickly casts an illusion that she knows what she is talking about. It somehow always works. Adulthood baffles me.
With this, Kim, somehow, supports the lost-in-translation theory, recounting the limited correspondence between he and the toad from just a few hours ago. “I said ‘hi’ when I sat, and he only said ‘thank you, brother’ when it was done.” Emma has heard enough. She whips out Google Translate, and pops a message about fun, friends, and a cash prize. Everyone has a number, folks. And in this case, that number is sixteen US dollars.
Emma approaches a different table this time with her new strategy, cell phone in hand, feigning interest in the tattooing session like some kind of upcoming local apprentice donning milkmaid braids and a modest J.Crew jumper. She hovers over a girl who looks like she’s from Long Island getting a whimsical leaf on her side boob. One table over there is an artist sketching up something that looks nothing like the request on the screen of the girl’s phone in front of him. He tells her it will cost her 30 Euro extra for a true rendering. She obliges. I love this place. Emma continues her hunt for the weakest of the herd.
When I'm not looking, she corners a frail, squirrelly, spectacled artist and flashes the translation in front of him. She reports getting a “quick nod” which she takes as an “absolute yes.” It is still crazy to me that I conveniently never saw this go down and I am trying to recall if they offered brass knuckles in the male rings display case.
Step 4 comes at us QUICK and follows the exact timeline as Step 5. It's time. Money changes hands. As we slink into a table, a very small crowd of servers closing the restaurant and remaining tattoo artists collects around us. We realize they may be under the impression that we have done this before and are in for a treat. Or at least stepped foot in a tattoo parlor. We haven’t.
While Kim does his best to orchestrate the mayhem and coach us in real-time, Emma steps up to the plate. She’ll start with an eye. We are instructed to pick a location, as front of legs are off limits so Kim can do them himself some day, and should we have thought this through better? Outside of left ankle. Cool. There is a sanitizing part that is easy to mess up and vaseline ends up everywhere.
Rexi, having watched this entire friendship blossom at his table, has come to see what the ruckus is all about. He is looking at sweet Emma with a vibrating gun in her hand, back at me, back at Emma, and back at me with confusion and terror in his eyes. I shove a phone in his hand that is recording the ceremony, instruct him to pick his jaw up off the floor and make himself useful. I supplement with photos on Emma's phone, becoming completely enthralled with producing efforts and do not watch the tattooing process AT ALL. Kim will have to reteach me everything in two minutes time. It is a three ring circus.
Emma banks the left eye first. It looks incredible. I am thinking maybe I can tap in for the second and then we flip for the mouth, but when she commits to the second eye, I know I’m stuck with the entire emotion of this doomed smiley. I am petrified. I remind myself - I am an artist, a creator, a visionary. This is my time. I’ve had 5 margaritas so it feels correct.
I snap theatrically into blue latex gloves and recall the nurse from the Blink 182 album cover. I harness her powers. I have changed back into my new dress to show respect and reverence for the situation.
I remember thinking the gun was going to be like a sewing machine, where you weight the pedal at the pace you need to move, but it doesn’t quite work that way. A faceless, nameless assistant taps a foot piece covered in saran wrap causing the machine to jolt alive violently. My team loads the needle with ink and I feel as if I'm about to sign the constitution, but the constitution is a stranger who will regret ever meeting me for the rest of his life. The torture device in my hand is hot, heavy and buzzing. I re-vaseline Kim up, stretch the skin of his ankle like he’s telling me to do, and ask him if he’s really okay with this. He’s half way through a horrible tattoo, Taylor. Do you think he's okay? Please stop.
I take a couple practice swings, like I would for a sketch, before my hand decides to commit a line into Kim's ankle. It is the most perfect line for the most perfect emotion. Relief overwhelms me. I wipe the excess ink away, like I’ve done this a million times before. Except I find underneath it there is... nothing. Erasure.
I did not PENETRATE DEEP ENOUGH. A closer look shows the faintest trace of black, like a hairline or vein, nearly undistinguishable to the human eye. Clearly, the makings of someone fearful to pierce past the dermis and leave Kim with blotting (industry term : BLOW OUT), and worse, a tattoo of the surprised emoji. I have to go back in. It takes three. more. tries. I don’t know how Kim is handling it. I'm too busy scream crying and avoiding eye contact.
I black out the next minute of my life. Somehow, someway, it gets done. When I come to, the tattoo looks at me, and I look at it. A love child of Kim, Emma, and myself. Despondent, disheartened, and alone - a cultural commentary on the collective sentiment of the Millennial generation. He is perfect. We thank the team of medical professionals, production staff, and our families - campaigning for shred of validation. We get none. We hug Kim a lot, and the scary tattoo artists and definitely our Rexi who directed our entire feature film pro bono. Pumped with the adrenaline of a scam pulled off, hubris of becoming overnight tattoo STARS - we hug again in the parking lot before turning in for the evening. Over our shoulders, we offer to the restaurant to come back as a tattooing duo next week, to be considered for residency if it goes well? The convenient language barrier returns.
Emma and I walk home, too amped and talking about the same things over and over again as girls like to do. The overarching theme is that it feels like WE ALL got the tattoo. And we have incredible Two Truths and a Lie / Never Have I Ever fodder. We eat a bunch of mediocre mediterranean food, pour over the footage, and and meet Snowball the mischievous dog who wants to hang out with us and eat all of our food. We feed him whatever he wants. The three of us roam the streets like the rough and tumble crew of miscreants we are.
The next morning, sober and rested, Emma and I know what we have to do. We open our phones and return to a photo of the tattoo.
I wince a little bit.
Emma thinks it looks great.
THE END.
LOVE YA KIM - THANKS FOR LETTING US DO THIS!!!!!! <3