I Am Bourgeois

I’m not a religious person at all, but I celebrate Christmas because it’s the one time in the year where you can spend time with your friends and (extended) family without pulling teeth just to make sure they show up. Only a jer won’t make time to have dinner with anyone over the holidays! Even though work, natural disasters, and other personal drama kept me from feeling the holiday spirit for most of December, I started feeling the love once Christmas Eve came around. It was nice being able to spend time with my family, and even nicer to have my boyfriend join us for our Christmas day lunch.

When my sister and I were babies, my mom started this tradition of buying nice party dresses for us to wear on Christmas so that we’d look cute in our annual family portrait. She kept up the tradition after we graduated from college, except she lets us take care of buying our own dresses. I saw my chance to shop for a Christmas dress after a work meeting at Megamall, but I only had two hours to look around, which wasn’t enough time to find suitable to wear for the holidays. In terms of clothes, I’m quite difficult to please, and almost nothing appeals to me at local online stores, let alone malls. After an hour of fruitless searching, I decided to give one last store a look before calling it quits and trying to find something nice on eBay. And wouldn’t you know – that store had the perfect dress for me all along!

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It’s been three years since my first tattoo (a barcode at the nape of my neck) and I had no plans of following up with a second one anytime soon. That is, until a few weeks ago, when I saw Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s Last Life in the Universe for the second time.

It’s a Thai movie about Kenji, an obsessive-compulsive Japanese librarian living in Bangkok who meets a girl named Noi during a suicide attempt. The two form an unlikely friendship despite their limited vocabulary and clashing personalities, and slowly recover from their personal tragedies during their brief time together. The Last Life in the Universe is one of the most enchanting and unpretentious movies I have ever seen, and you have to see it in order to really appreciate its beauty.

The tattoo I wanted is based on the cover art of a Japanese children’s book called The Last Lizard, which Kenji was obsessed about.

It’s not the prettiest of book covers, but I was so moved by the lizard’s sad tale and how it manages to capture my recurring feelings of loneliness and isolation that I wanted to make it a part of me somehow. There’s no way to explain what the tattoo means to me without sounding melodramatic, so let me leave it at that.

I got Dyani Lao to do my tattoo because he’s done wonderful work on my friends, and because he’s a real tattoo artist in the sense that he only does custom designs. I really needed some help with the design because the large circle thing would have looked weird and awkward, but I had no clue how to make it better. Dyani did such an amazing job that I wanted to get tattooed the moment he emailed his sketch!

I decided that the tattoo would go on my calf, mostly because I don’t see a point in getting one if you’re going to place it on a spot that’s always hidden. At the same time, I wasn’t ready for all the annoying questions and parental drama that comes with an arm tattoo. So the back of my calf was the perfect spot. I wear a lot of dresses and shorts so it will definitely be visible, but it’s such a subtle location that no one will really notice until they look hard enough. It only took two hours to get the tattoo done and no, it didn’t really hurt.

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