World, The Girl With the Unicorn Tattoo

After more than three decades, the green unicorn tattoo on my right buttock has significantly paled. At least parts of it have. The flanks of the animal, formerly outlined, are now a dotted line. The horn droops.

Thirty-six years ago I was a college freshman and away from home for the first time. Whereas in my small Californian beach town nothing seemed possible, I’d landed in a groovy city where everything seemed possible. I could stay out all night, drink and smoke whatever, skip classes or take magic mushrooms — most of my cohort did.

But ditching my high school persona of stellar student and cheerleader was a hurdle. I wanted to run fast and loose but couldn’t bear to skip a class and found the after effects of drinking unbearable. I was naïve and prudish; the boy who took me on a “date” to a hot tub was sadly surprised to find, while groping in the bubbles, my one-piece bathing suit.

Yet I deeply wanted to be edgy and artistic. I read Henry Miller and Anais Nin and Jack Kerouac with the focus of a pirate reading a treasure map.

One night, munching popcorn in my dorm, I hatched the idea of a tattoo. It was the mid-1970s and a tattoo was not what it is today. Tattoos were for sailors, bikers and Janis Joplin. It would be 20 years before they were reinvented as fake tribal indicators of urban cool.

With coaxing, three of my dorm mates signed on. We shared ideas of what we wanted: one chose a fish on her hip with fins that moved when she walked. Another went for a bluebird on the shoulder, another for a rose at the bikini line. That was essentially the entire lexicon of women’s tattoos at the time.

I decided on a hand-drawn unicorn, in jade green. “Mythical, a symbol of hope,” I wrote in my journal. “Like the Emerald City because what I seek is in myself!”