MIA FREEDMAN: About that tattoo I just got.

I got my first tattoo on my 30th birthday. It was a gift to myself on a birthday spent alone. Not in a sad way, I was just single. I was also the mother of a four-year-old which strangely made me feel better about getting the tattoo.

It felt more subversive and unexpected than getting one when I was 19. I cut all my hair off and bleached it white back then instead.

But at 30, I was ready for ink.

Much like getting a fringe, I’ve come to believe, at least for me, that getting a tattoo is not about the tattoo. It’s about having big feelings. Feelings so big that they must be manifested externally.

And when I was about to turn 30, I had very big feelings.

I was the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, a job I loved and my career was going well. The rest of my life, though, was not going the way I thought it would.

I was still grieving a pregnancy, well, a baby girl actually, who had died inside me in the days after my wedding and the aftermath had caused the collapse of my brand new marriage within months.

I’d been a single mother for a couple of years during which time I’d moved into a small apartment with my toddler son, navigated custody with my ex, and endured some tricky firsts as co-parents... first birthday party, first mothers’ and fathers’ days, first Christmas... and taught myself how to cook. Uber Eats would not be a reality for more than a decade so dinner was scarce in the noughts, children. It was a dark and challenging time and that is why we are made of resilience.

So back to my tattoo. And it was, in fact, a back-tattoo that I wanted because I am the most basic bitch that ever basic bitched.

“An Aztec design on my lower back,” I told the guy at the tattoo place my friend took me to during my lunch hour on the day I turned 30.

There was not a single thing significant about my tattoo other than it was a thing at the time and it made me feel sexy and dangerous.

It hurt like a motherf**ker, but not as much as childbirth and beauty is pain. I wanted to claim my body back from the hatred I’d felt towards it for not keeping my unborn baby safe. I wanted to mark my territory on myself like a dog weeing on a tree but I was the tree and also the dog.

It felt good.

I felt cool. I reasoned that getting a tattoo at 30 exempted me from the risk of doing something young and stupid because even though I was still doing stupid things and would go on to do many more, nobody thinks of 30 as too young to get a tattoo.

Twenty years ago, 30 was kind of a surprising age to get one and I liked being surprising because did I mention I’m a basic bitch and it’s very on brand to try so hard to be subversive.

I still felt cool. That night, I threw myself a birthday party in a bar and I kept dragging my friends into the bathroom to show them my tattoo.

A year later, while at the Logies for the first and last time as a contributor for The Today Show, I decided that the dance floor at 2am was a great time to show my fellow dancers my tattoo.

My dress was long and my tattoo was still on my lower back and that was not even on the list of top 10,000 inappropriate things that have happened at the Logies.

Because it is somewhere I can’t see it, I can spend years forgetting that I have a tattoo. It’s only when others catch a glimpse (usually when I bend over or am wearing a bikini) that I’m reminded.

Between my 30th birthday and last weekend, I thought many times about getting another tattoo, starting the day after I got my first one.

It’s addictive, that’s true. Once you’ve broken the seal of your skin and put ink underneath it with a thousand tiny needles, anything seems possible.

Again though, with the fringe analogy, the times I’ve been most tempted to go back for more have been ones when I really shouldn’t have. Like when I had just been diagnosed with anxiety after completely losing my s**t in a weeks-long rolling panic attack and having come out the other side of it and stabilised my mental health, I started to muse out loud about getting a new tattoo. “Ah, maybe it would be a great idea to wait until you were feeling a little more... you know... yourself?” my husband ventured. Fair point.

Another decade later, I was ready and ironically or predictably or both; it was one of my children hankering for a tattoo that got me thinking about it again.

So I reached out to another friend for a recommendation and booked myself an appointment with Scott. 

Image: Supplied.

I wanted words in scripty font because that is the lower back Aztec design of 2022.

I thought about it for a while and landed on these words: Chasing The Rainbow.

It’s the name of a song by America and it has a special meaning in our family. Also, rainbows.

The process itself was shorter and less painful than my first tattoo. 

Image: Supplied.

The biggest difference is that I can see it although admittedly, only really in the mirror when I lift up my arm. It doesn’t feel intrusive.

Will I get bored of it? Oh, undoubtedly. Will I one day get it removed? Quite probably. But at 51, I’m feeling good about my basic b*tch ink.

Feature Image: Supplied.