Isabel Davies Jones
the origin story of quite a bad tattoo
About a week before I turned 20, I had a crisis. I was – and am – absolutely terrified of growing up.
On February 10, 2020, I would leave my teenage years behind me forever, without, I felt, having finished my course of adolescent rebellion. My 20th birthday loomed with my quarter-life crisis festering in the background, and I got a tattoo.
This tattoo has become the subject of much ridicule amongst my friends. The question tends to be: ‘what is that?’
Sometimes, if I can’t be bothered to explain, knowing that this question is a direct result of my lack of impulse control, I say I don’t know. Or I make something up. A bouncer once grabbed my wrist as I was queuing to get into a club. I thought I was about to be refused entry, but, to my surprise, he burst out laughing and said ‘what the fuck is that?’ When people ask if it’s a hat, I accept defeat and say ‘yes’. There have been many theories; a saucepan, a hill, and my favourite: a F1 racetrack. But it is none of those things.
What it is, is the outline of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Expuery.
This makes it worse than before, because now I am pretentious as well as having a stupid tattoo. But, I think, there was good reasoning behind it.
The Little Prince – for those who weren’t lucky enough to read it as a kid, or for those who did read it as a kid and need a reminder – is a children’s book about a pilot who crashes in the desert and meets a boy who has come to earth from a tiny planet. It’s a bit surreal. There’s very little plot. They just chat and the little prince tells the narrator about his travels. Over time, I have come back to this book again and again.
The tattoo on my wrist is taken from the opening which I will summarise badly now: The narrator speaks about when, at six years old, he read a book about the jungle. Inspired by the fact boa constrictors swallow prey whole and digest for six months, he attempts to draw a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. He proceeds to show it to the grown-ups… who think it is a picture of a hat. To show them what it actually is, he draws a diagram with the elephant inside the boa constrictor so that they might understand.
They advise him to stick to learning about the important things – ‘geography, history, arithmetic and grammar’ – and give up drawing.
Throughout this little book, there are constant references to the ‘grown-ups’. A ‘grown-up’ is simply someone who has lost their imagination. I got the picture on my wrist to try and remind myself not to become like the ‘grown-ups’ but I am still terrified of it.
I’m scared I’ll wake up and be 30 years old and my friends will be having children, going to pilates classes, moving out to Surrey. We’ll drink a glass of wine with dinner, not a bottle, and they’ll talk about how badly we once behaved. Will they still want to stay up chatting until 4am about ideas for a podcast that will never be made? Will they want to climb into fountains in Rome in the middle of the night? Will they want to wear outrageous costumes to dinner for no apparent reason? Will I?
I don’t know if I’m paranoid, or if I can already see this element
dissolving around me.
But maybe I am getting it wrong. Being a ‘grown-up’ might not all lie in what you do. How much of it is really embedded in childish misbehaviour? Do we have to lose the silliness to grow up?
There are many sections in The Little Prince that are important to me. The writing is simple but beautiful, the kind of book you can enjoy at any age. There’s no shame in picking up a book for children. It won’t take you long. I think this extract from chapter 4 is good at summing up one of the big points Antoine de Saint-Expury makes:
‘If you were to say to the grown-ups: “I saw a beautiful house made of rosy brick, with geraniums in the windows and doves on the roof,” they would not be able to get any idea of that house at all. You would have to say to them: “I saw a house that cost $20,000.” Then they would exclaim: “Oh, what a pretty house that is!”
Just so, you might say to them: “The proof that the little prince existed is that he was charming, that he laughed, and that he was looking for a sheep. If anybody wants a sheep, that is a proof that he exists.” And what good would it do to tell them that? They would shrug their shoulders, and treat you like a child. But if you said to them: “The planet he came from is Asteroid B-612,” then they would be convinced, and leave you in peace from their questions.
They are like that. One must not hold it against them. Children should always show great forbearance toward grown-up people.’
One of the things that I am most scared of now, a year and a bit on, is the future me looking back at the way I am now and thinking that I was naive. That because I was only on the cusp of adulthood, I couldn’t understand what the realities and responsibilities of being a ‘grown-up’ were. I don’t want that to happen. I can take feeling embarrassed about hair disasters, fashion choices, and a bad work ethic, but not this.
I remember thinking as the tattoo needle was in my skin, that it was meant to be a pre-emptive ‘fuck you’ to future me if she ever becomes too caught up with ‘grown-up’ things. If she thinks it’s childish one day, there’s not much she can do, apart from getting it removed, (but I know enough about myself now to assume that I’ll always be too lazy to do that.)
Now, when I face my fear of getting older, I look at my wrist and try to remember that the thing I am really scared of has nothing to do with age – that being ‘grown-up’ is a state of mind that you can choose.
All in all, 20 quid well spent.
