Expires 10/2056

Almost everyone I know or hope to know or used to know or will never know here in California has a tattoo.

A friend of mine has the pink cancer ribbon tattooed on her chest where her breasts used to be.

Another pal has her new boyfriends name twining around her ankle, in a rolling viney sort of pattern so that if it doesn't work out between them she can just add more vines and obliterate him in the process.

It seems once you get a tattoo, the barriers are down and the next thing that happens is you can't wait for the next one. And the one after that...and so on, until you totally run out of body space and start shopping around for some to rent.

I see it in our future: People with Other People attached to them by rope or chain or staples whose sole purpose in life is to display Permanent Body Art.

Soon, Ralph Lauren and The Gap and Nike and all the Other Hot Brands will be forgoing labeling their clothing and will go straight to body tattooing as a means of dispensing their advertising across the globe.

Remember when Volkswagen did that? You could get a 7-UP commercial painted on your car, drive it around for a year and then they'd pay to have it repainted the color of your choice.

If you got THE GAP tattooed across your chest it would certainly get a lot of people looking at your cleavage.

I suppose the Grand Canyon would be vying for space on the asses of the obese.

And in later years, there will no doubt be a real fad for digging up dead bodies and making collectibles out of the skin art...there may even be a market for being a tattoo donor by then.

But I am adamant that I will not be getting any tattoos. I know they are hugely ingrained in our culture now and for most of the population are considered totally the Norm. But I can't help but hearken back to my childhood when the only people with tattoos were old sailors who smoked Camels and had black, bleary, bleeded-out tattoos on their hairy and wrinkled arms and torsos.

Tattoos were for Truckers and I never can escape that imagery. The tattoo is forever, but the skin it's imprinted on? Gets Old. Gets Wrinkled. Gets Saggy. Gets Liver Spots.

But then, because I never can stand to be left out of a trend, and because I figure when I'm 72 it's really not going to matter if I get a tattoo because there will be no one of my acquaintance left alive to harass me about it, and because I dearly love a good joke, I have decided to get a Tattoo on my Posterior when I'm Old that says...:

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