I’m Thinking About Getting a Dinosaur Tattoo (And What That Says About Adult Aesthetic Decisions)

The dinosaur tattoo I want is small, on my left inner forearm, of a Microraptor. The Microraptor was a four-winged feathered dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous, about the size of a crow, with iridescent black plumage that has been recovered from fossil melanosomes (which is the kind of phrase you start using when you have spent too long on Wikipedia learning about Cretaceous biogeography in preparation for a tattoo decision). I have been thinking about this tattoo for eleven months. I have not yet booked the appointment.

The reason I have not yet booked the appointment is not that I am unsure about the tattoo. I am, in fact, certain about the tattoo. The reason is that the tattoo is going to commit me to a specific public version of myself for the rest of my life, and I am still working out whether I want to be the person who has a Microraptor on her forearm or the person who almost got a Microraptor on her forearm but didn’t.

These are different people. They wear different clothes. They have different professional postures. They get treated differently in client meetings. The Microraptor person is, very slightly, more legibly weird than the no-Microraptor person. The weird is part of what I want. The weird is also something I will have to live with on days when I would rather be reading as conventionally professional, and the calculus of those days is what I have been quietly running for almost a year.

This is, I think, what adult aesthetic decisions actually look like. Not “do I want this thing.” The wanting is easy. Do I want to be the person who chose this thing. The wanting is about the object. The deciding is about the future-self the object will partially construct.

Twelve-year-old me would have done this in a week

When I was twelve I would not have hesitated. I had a phase of dinosaur obsession in late elementary school that produced, among other things: a hand-drawn paleontology binder with my own classification system, a serious belief that I would grow up to be a vertebrate paleontologist, an enormous resentment toward the Velociraptor inaccuracies in Jurassic Park, and a specific scaled drawing of a Microraptor I keep in a drawer to this day. Twelve-year-old me would have taken the Microraptor drawing to a tattoo artist and had it inked permanently into her body before lunch. She would not have considered the professional implications.

The fact that I have to consider the professional implications is a function of having become a working freelance designer who occasionally has to sit across from clients who are paying me to take seriously the visual coherence of their brand. Some of those clients would think a Microraptor on my forearm is charming and read it as evidence of taste. Some would think it is unprofessional. The split is approximately 60-40 in my favor, by my best estimate, but the 40 represents real lost work. Twelve-year-old me did not have to do this math. The math is the cost of having to make a living.

The half-life of an aesthetic certainty

The other reason I have been slow on this is that I know, from extensive personal observation, that aesthetic certainties have a half-life of about five years. The Microraptor I want today is not the Microraptor I would have wanted in 2017 (that one would have been a generic raptor silhouette in solid black). It is not the Microraptor I would have wanted in 2012 (that one would have been a more cartoonish, almost Steven-Spielberg-influenced version). The current Microraptor is the result of a decade’s drift in my own visual sensibility, and it is, statistically, the most refined version I am likely to want for the next 5-7 years before drifting further.

Tattoos are, structurally, betting on the longer half-life. The decision is whether you trust your current aesthetic sensibility enough to commit it to your body for forty-plus years. Most people, when they look at the tattoos they got at 22, see an aesthetic snapshot of who they were at 22, which is sometimes affectionate and sometimes mortifying. The challenge of the adult tattoo decision is to commit to a thing that will continue to feel correct as you continue to drift, which is a much harder problem than just liking the design today.

The Microraptor passes the longer-half-life test for me, I think, because the underlying interest (specific extinct vertebrates, scientifically accurate paleoart, the soft melancholy of taxonomic obsession with creatures that are gone) is a stable feature of who I have been since the binder phase in 1998 and is, I suspect, going to continue being a stable feature. The visual rendering will date. The interest will not. The tattoo is, in this sense, a commitment less to the design than to the underlying obsession.

Why I am writing about this instead of getting it

I am writing about this instead of getting it because writing about it is the form the deciding takes. Adult aesthetic decisions, for me, get processed through writing. I do not “decide” things in the abstract; I decide them by writing about them until the deciding becomes obvious. This essay is the eighth thing I have written about the dinosaur tattoo over the last eleven months. Each previous one revealed a different angle on the question. This one is, I suspect, the last one before I either book the appointment or finally let the want quietly fade.

Susan Stewart’s On Longing (1984, still the best book on the cultural meaning of objects we choose to live with) has an essay on the souvenir as a way of “anchoring” a personal experience to a physical object. The Microraptor would be, in this taxonomy, a partly-souvenir tattoo: it anchors me to the binder-phase obsession of 1998, to the specific developmental moment when a child’s interest in vertebrate paleontology became a permanent part of her identity, and to the much later adult moment of choosing to honor that child’s certainty rather than overrule it. Stewart writes about souvenirs as ways of preserving the past. The Microraptor would be a way of preserving the trajectory through the past: a literal mark on adult skin of a child’s particular taste.

This is, possibly, why I want it. Possibly why I am still hesitating. The tattoo would resolve a question I have been quietly carrying about whether the various phases of my life are continuous or whether they are different people. The Microraptor would assert continuity. Asserting continuity is, in a working life of constant client-driven aesthetic switching, a real thing to assert.

The decision, eventually

I am going to get the tattoo. Not today. Probably not this month. Probably this fall, after a current client project wraps and there is a clean week to heal and the immediate professional implications are at their lowest. I will probably write one more essay about it, this one in the past tense, after it is done.

The thing I want anyone reading this to take from it is the small observation that adult aesthetic decisions are not really about the aesthetic; they are about the kind of public self the aesthetic constructs and the level of risk tolerance you have for visible weirdness as a working adult. The Microraptor is fine as a design. The Microraptor as a commitment to being slightly more visibly strange in the rooms you pay rent in is a different kind of decision, and it deserves the long deliberation.

If you are sitting on a similar decision (a tattoo, a hair color, a piece of clothing that is just past your current public-aesthetic risk tolerance, a piece of jewelry you keep wanting to wear and not wearing), I would encourage you to do the long deliberation rather than rush past it. The deliberation is part of the choosing. The deliberation tells you, eventually, whether the want is the kind of want that survives translation into commitment.

For me, with the Microraptor, the answer (after eleven months and eight essays) is yes. For you, with whatever-it-is, the answer might be no, or yet, or different-but-related. The point is the asking. The asking is the actual adult-aesthetic practice. The buying-of-the-thing is just the receipt.

I’ll let you know how the tattoo turns out. The Cretaceous, I have been told by a paleontologist friend, is having a cultural moment. The Microraptor, specifically, has been beating other extinct vertebrates in the popularity charts for the kind of person who gets dinosaur tattoos at 32. So I will not, exactly, be alone in this. There will be other Microraptors out there. We will recognize each other quietly, in client meetings, and nod, and continue our respective workdays as the slightly-weirder-than-average adults we have, by deliberate choice, become.