Indiana Joel/The Ubyssey

It could have been worse. I could have had a swear word tattooed on my neck or a naked lady on my stomach. I’ve seen misspelled translations and smudged artwork. Google “bad tattoos” and your browser will be inundated with hundreds of images of horrifying ink work.

So maybe I shouldn’t be too upset about the small tribal dolphin tattooed on my right forearm.

I wasn’t drunk. I was just in a weird mood during a rainstorm on Koh Phi Phi, a tropical island off the west coast of Thailand. There’s a tattoo parlor pretty much every 20 feet and tourists flock in, drunk from the beach parties, to get Thai writing or elaborate dragons or some other cliché permanently etched on their skin. The places stay open until the early hours of the morning.

I saw one girl with the Coca-Cola symbol on her ribcage. Another dude got “Spicy Red Curry 45 Baht” tattooed across his shoulders in Thai. When I asked him why he had his favourite menu item on his back, he asked me, “Why don’t you?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Wha’ you want?” he asked. I only thought about it for a second. “A dolphin,” I replied.

My little sister has a dolphin tattoo, and that makes sense for her. Both of us were competitive swimmers with the Pacific Dolphins when we were teenagers. I figured we could match. And you know what? I’ve always wanted to be the kind of guy who goes to Thailand and gets ill-advised tattoos.

Now I am.

It was an interesting experience, laying on my back watching geckos slither across the bamboo thatching in the ceiling.

“Wha’? You no cry?” asked Boom, my artist, while he repeatedly stabbed me with a sharp piece of bamboo. He smiled at me. When people look at the photos, they all say the same thing: “You let that guy tattoo you?”

In the pictures, Boom has a frizzy mop of hair trailing in all directions out of his bandana and a sparse little goatee. He’s about half my size and he’s not wearing a shirt. Neither am I, now that I think of it. And then of course there’s the fact that the guy is named Boom. At first I didn’t believe him, thinking maybe I was mishearing him.

“My name Boom. Like Boom-Boom,” he said. Then he laughed.

So while that was a fun little adventure, now I find myself traipsing around with a questionable tattoo in plain sight. Every time I lift my hand to my face or run my fingers through my hair or drape my arm around a friend, there it is: my little dolphin.

I’ve debated my options for a while. I thought about getting it covered with a larger tattoo, or maybe getting it lasered off. But while I’ve spent over a year deliberating, it’s starting to look pretty comfortable there.

Some say I should keep it, to remind me of the experience. But I have a feeling it will be hard to forget.

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