Dream Journal 2019-01-27: Fish Davidson Gets A Tattoo
Author’s Note/Apology: You may have noticed that I have not been updating as regularly as I have in the past. In addition to dealing with another dream drought, I’ve also had a writing project that has eaten up a lot more of my time than expected. The project should be concluded at the end of the month or a maybe the first week of February; and hopefully I’ll be writing more regularly then. See you soon! --Fish
The daughter of my childhood swim coach got her Micro Tattoo Certification at this start of this dream. For efficiency’s sake, I’m going to call her “AM” because that’s way easier to type than “the daughter of my childhood swim coach.”
This is a completely fictitious certification that exists only within the reality of the dream, and micro tattoos aren’t just tiny tattoos. According to the formal definition, a micro tattoo cannot exceed 0.25 inches (64mm) in any dimension. Micro tattoos must also be drawn with a very particular type of instrument that looks like a regular tattoo gun crossed with a pantograph. (Side Note: a pantograph is a type of tool used for reducing or enlarging drawings and it took a lot of googling to find out what the actual name of this tool was because I had always called it an “engraver translator thingy” BUT NOW I KNOW THE CORRECT NAME)
When you hold a magnifying lens up to a properly constructed micro tattoo, it’s supposed to be clearly visible to at least a level of 10x magnification. And now that this interesting piece of subconscious worldbuilding is disclosed, my subconscious completely drops any further mention of micro tattoos and their related certifications. AM had just opened up a new tattoo shop with a few other people that I went to school with, and I wanted to snag the honor of getting a regular tattoo on their first day open. So I walk across town (through light traffic and also the yards of random people) and march into the shop.
“I’d like to get a tattoo, please!” I say.
“What kind do you want?” AM asks.
I hand her a piece of paper with some Japanese kanji written on it.
“Oh, nice! What does it say? Strength, power, serenity? Something else?” She asks.
“It says ‘corn kernels,’“ I tell her with a straight face.
“Are you serious?” she asks and squints at the paper. “You want a tattoo that literally says “corn kernels” on it in Japanese?”
And so she sat me down in the chair and tattooed exactly what I wanted onto my left wrist. I paid and left, and only me and AM (and every person who can read Japanese) will know what my fancy tattoo says.
P.S. According to Google this is what my new tattoo looked like: 玉蜀黍
