Tattoos

When I was younger, I never saw the point of tattoos. You’re going to put something on your body…forever? What if you change your mind? And so I started thinking about a business where you can get a tattoo that lasts for about five years and then it starts to disappear, and then you can get something else if you want. I thought that would probably be a cool business. It would probably suck.

The whole reason people get tattoos is because they’re permanent. And since I got tattoos, the thing I learned about having tattoos is that even if you have a change of heart, the tattoo represents a historical record of where you were at that moment in time. You can look back on it with nostalgia. Lots of people like that “NO RAGRETS” meme, but when it comes to tattoos, there really are no regrets, unless you get a Tasmanian Devil or Yosemite Sam or the name of an ex-girlfriend or boyfriend. There are some things that are just a bad idea.

I got my first tattoo in 2018 or 2019—can’t remember. I actually got two at once. I got a large semicolon tattooed on the inside of my right forearm. If you don’t know, the semicolon tattoo is part of something called the Semicolon Project, which is about raising awareness of mental illness. The idea is that your life is a sentence and you could have ended it with a period—and instead you put a semicolon there and you kept going. Most of the time you see people with a tiny one on their wrist—I got one big and bold and put it on my forearm, and I put it there as a reminder in case I ever thought about suicide again. I actually get a bit choked up thinking about it.

The other tattoo I got was my DJ logo on the inside of my right biceps. It reads “STOCHASTIC” in a font called Countdown, which is the late 70s futuristic font from the movie Rollerball. You also used to see it in Tomorrowland in Disney World in the early 1980s. It’s very cool. You can see it when I’m fist-pumping in the DJ booth.

At this point I should mention that I did a lot of due diligence on tattoo parlors before I chose one. Some people ask me if I got my tattoos in Myrtle Beach. Ha, are you fucking kidding me? For sure, there are about a dozen tattoo parlors here, with names like BULLDAWG and stuff like that. They’re all on Seaboard street as a result of very restrictive zoning laws. Seaboard street is the road of bad decisions, with bad tattoo parlors, piercing joints, vape shops, and strip clubs. If you’re ever in Myrtle Beach, I recommend you check it out for yourself—in the daytime. The parking lots of the tattoo places get full at night, and there is a whole subculture of getting drunk in the parking lot on Seaboard Street and getting horrible tattoos as a result. Myrtle Beach is known for its riffraff, some of the best around. It really is incredible.

No, I got a recommendation from a friend in Atlanta for a place there called Stygian Gallery, run by a mad genius artist and his Swiss-German wife. There is a legitimate art gallery in the front of the store and the tattoo parlor is in the back. I’m a client of the wife—Desirée—she is responsible for all of the artwork on my body. She has just superhuman attention to detail. I will stop and stare at some of the artwork she’s done on me, and I just cannot find a single flaw. And that’s the thing about tattoos—the quality varies greatly according to the artist. I look at a tattoo and I can immediately tell you if it is good or bad. 90% of them are bad. Some of them are terrible. They say that tattoos are a class marker. Well, even within the universe of tattoos, there are class markers. There are low-class tattoos and high-class tattoos. There are the tattoos you get in an art gallery and the tattoos that you get from picking out a piece of flash in a sailor tattoo parlor in San Diego. All the artwork on my body cost about $6,000. And I use the word artwork purposefully—that’s what it is: art. Unfortunately, the artists packed up and moved to Pennsylvania a couple of months ago, so if I want to get anything else done, I will have to get on a plane. I assure you I will do it. It is that important.

I was pretty nervous about my first two tattoos, for obvious reasons. The one on my forearm didn’t hurt—just felt like scratching. The one on the inside of my biceps hurt a bit, but it’s not large, so it didn’t take long. Some of the later stuff I did hurt quite a lot. Yes, it hurts, and there’s something about prolonged periods of time with small amounts of pain—you get all wrung out and emotional, like you’re watching The Notebook or something like that. The thing about getting a tattoo is that afterwards, you immediately start thinking of what other tattoos you’re going to get. They’re like potato chips—hard to have just one. I wanted a half sleeve on my left forearm. I threw some ideas together and gave them to Desiree, and she came up with this amazing piece of art involving a lot of dot work. Then I got my right forearm done, with some geometric stuff, then my left upper arm, with lots of geometric stuff, then my right upper arm with a giant black spider chrysanthemum. I finished it off last year with a tattoo of my cats’ initials stuvwxy and a black cat silhouette on my right shoulder blade, to honor my cat Otto who passed away in 2014. If you asked me how many tattoos I have, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Basically, at this point I have two whole sleeves, plus the black cat on my back.

Do I regret any of them? Not yet! I had to get to a point where I was making enough money and I was secure enough with my place in the world that I really didn’t give a fuck what anybody thought. And that’s what tattoos are—the ultimate expression of DGAF. Which is why you see a lot of people on the high end get them—and a lot of people on the low end—but not the people in between. Those are the people that GAF, the working stiffs, the W-2 employees who have to mind their Ps and Qs or end up on the wrong side of company politics. There are not many tattoos on Wall Street. There are some, but they remain covered up, even when not in the office. I have them loud and proud on my arms, and given that I live in a warm place, I’m wearing short sleeves pretty much all the time. I do have some boundaries. I won’t wear them on TV. I did a Bloomberg interview last summer and I didn’t have a jacket, so elected to do the interview at my desk instead of in the studio so the tattoos wouldn’t be visible. And if I’m going somewhere where the ink would be viewed negatively, I just wear a jacket. Problem solved.

I’m a bit unusual in that I decided to do this late in life. I was 44, I think, when I got my first ones. There are numerous advantages to this. The first is that when you’re 44, you pretty much know who you are, you know what you want, and you’re unlikely to experience regret. The second advantage is more practical—tattoos do fade over time, especially with exposure to the sun, and if you get a tattoo when you’re 22, by the time you are 44 it will look like a blob. I’m sure you’ve seen these Navy WWII tattoos that are just a blue smudge after years in the elements. I figure mine will look good up until I’m 65 or 70, at which point it won’t matter much. The one thing that is a bit of a nuisance is that I need to load up on sunscreen if I’m going to spend any time out at the pool, SPF 30 or higher. As a result, I just don’t spend much time in the sun anymore—easier that way.

Will I get any more? I’m not planning on it. I wear a lot of V-neck shirts, and if I get one on my chest, it will show. My pal Tony Greer says that a man should only get tattoos on his wingspan—the arms, and across the top of the chest and back—not the legs. I agree with this. Funny thing about tattoos—when I was in my 20s and 30s, I had a real aversion to them. In fact, if I saw someone with tattoos preparing my food, I got weirded out. I thought tattoos on women were horrible. But now that I have my own, I find tattoos on the opposite sex to be incredibly attractive. Hot. Who knows what that’s all about.