Help, My Inner Rebel is in a Coma

At different times in my life, I have been:

o A hippy who bought all of my flowy natural-colored clothes at thrift stores and cut my own hair, and carried everything in a woven hemp bag that I bought from a street vendor in San Francisco.
o A surfer chick wannabe who wore Roxy, carried a Hurley corduroy school bag, and spent summers in a tropical print sarong and bikini top – even when I wasn’t at the beach.
o A naturalist who wore Chacos with my shorts and t-shirts, had a whistle on a chain around my neck, and a purple Nalgene covered with stickers perpetually hanging off my right index finger. In winter I added a fleece pullover as a concession to the dip in temperature, but otherwise the uniform did not change.
o A working woman who wore dress pants, heels, and crisply ironed (or, well, thrown-back-into-the-dryer-for-a-few-seconds ironed) button down shirts, who carried a black faux leather planner and wore mascara daily.
o A new mom who wore whatever was clean whether it matched or not.

So, at different times in my life, I have wanted:

o A tattoo of a sun or daisy – stylized, with some sort of reference to Peace – maybe the word Pax?
o A tattoo of one of those Hawaiian looking flowers, or maybe a dolphin or turtle.
o A tattoo of a lizard, or salamander, or frog, or maybe a tree.
o A tattoo of the rune for G, the first letter of my name.
o A tattoo of my son’s name and birthdate, or maybe just his first initial. Or his and mine and my husband’s intials intertwined in some kind of design, with room for any additional kids to be inked in later on.

And I have wanted these tattoos:

o On my right shoulder blade
o On my ankle, next to wear the surfboard strap would go (ha! Like I ever even learned to surf!)
o On my wrist, peeking out of my fleece pullover sleeve
o On my hip – easy to hide
o On any part of me that hadn’t stretched to oblivion during the pregnancy – perhaps my earlobe? My forehead?

This is why I do not have a tattoo. If in the past 5 years I have waffled this much in my personal style – how on earth could I pick something permanent to draw on my skin that I could never change (without lots of pain and money spent – youch, Wicked!)

Another reason is that my parents have a (in my opinion) slightly ridiculous attitude towards tattoos. To put it mildly, they are very anti-tat and might literally not speak to me for months if I got one. I’m 29 years old, yes, and totally financially independent for years now, and I get to choose what I do – but I know in the back of my mind that if I choose to get a tattoo and it’s one my parents see, that I will be creating a really annoying problem that I’ll have to deal with for the rest of my life. This is not to say that I still won’t get one. It’s to say that in doing the cost-benefit-analysis of getting one, I have to weigh my parents’ temporarily disowning me as one of the costs. Except for this slightly overbearing way of parenting grown children, I do like my parents and very much like spending time with them. So, it's a dilemma.

Did I just say cost-benefit-analysis with regards to getting a tattoo? Oh man. The little rebel in the corner of my soul just collapsed. I’d better hurry out and get inked pronto in order to revive him, or I may as well just start drawing Social Security benefits right now, because I’m officially nine hundred years old.