#on tattoos

On tattoo regret: I had it exactly once, on the color on the leaves of the second half of my stomach, which was weird, because I'd loved it the day before, when it was fresh, and had zero upset feelings about the color on the left side.

One thing about being extensively tattooed and dreaming is that sometimes your sleeping mind will forget to put them on, and then you will have to be like, hold the phone, brain, we put a lot of time into those, you put those back!

I want the world on my skin.

Arching his back and waving languidly toward a waitress, Mr. Affleck exposes a smeary splotch on his right shoulder. ''I was 16,'' he says, blushing. ''I got a fake ID, went out and got a tattoo of barbed wire. Then I decided I didn't like the tattoo.'' He had roses etched over the barbed wire. ''I decided I didn't like the roses, either.'' Hence, the splotch. ''You get to be my age, there's real pressure—family pressure, peer pressure—to start thinking about marriage, kids and all that stuff,'' he says. ''I want to make sure I take that decision very seriously, and not before I'm ready. Whenever I think something's not to be taken lightly, I just look down at my arm and remember how different my frame of mind was when I got the tattoo.''

When you are tattooed you are not anymore fat or skinny, small or big. You are tattooed. And what you tattoo on you is not what mother nature made you, it is what you decide for yourself. That is also part of the reason why tattoos are so addictive; that feeling of power over nature, society. Self-determinism.