As my love for tattoos — as an art form and a method of self-expression — has deepened, I find myself experiencing a subtle anxiety: I only have so much space on my skin.

As I write this, I have tattoos covering: all of my left arm, most of my right arm, all of my back, both of my hands, and the lower half of my right leg.

The total surface area of my skin is around 18,000 cm². This means that I can only ever fit 180 tattoos that measure 10 x 10 cm, or 360 tattoos that measure 20 cm x 10 cm, or so on. And this doesn’t account for the fact that there are parts of my body that I want to keep clear of tattoos, like my face, my scalp, and the soles of my feet.

So, I can’t possibly get every tattoo that I will ever want. I have to be selective, of course.

These thoughts are expressed well by Ed Hardy, a legend in tattoo history who was active in the United States in the 20th century, in his biography Wear Your Dreams: My Life in Tattoos:

Having those areas of clean skin is like money in the bank.

So how should one proceed? Every tattoo that I do get inevitably closes the door to another tattoo that could’ve occupied that space on my skin. But if I don’t want to make the hard choice of what tattoo goes where on my body, it’s easy to imagine how I could succumb to analysis paralysis, and leave areas of my skin totally clear of tattoos out of fear that I’ll make the wrong choice. In that case, I won’t get any tattoos, which is an even worse outcome. Even money in the bank has no value if you don’t ever spend it.

A relevant passage from that 2022 masterpiece of applied philosophy Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman:

[…] It’s a fact of life that, as a finite human, you’re always making hard choices – so that, for example, in spending this afternoon on one thing that mattered to me (writing), I necessarily had to forgo many other things that mattered too (like playing with my son). […] it’s precisely the fact that getting married forecloses the possibility of meeting someone else – someone who might genuinely have been a better marriage partner; who could ever say? – that makes marriage meaningful. The exhilaration that sometimes arises when you grasp this truth about finitude has been called the ‘joy of missing out’ […] In this state of mind, you can embrace the fact that you’re forgoing certain pleasures, or neglecting certain obligations, because whatever you’ve decided to do instead – earn money to support your family, write your novel, bath the toddler, pause on a hiking trail to watch a pale winter sun sink below the horizon at dusk – is how you’ve chosen to spend a portion of time that you never had any right to expect.

To paraphrase Burkeman, it is precisely the fact that getting a tattoo forecloses the possibility of getting a different tattoo — one which might genuinely have been a better tattoo; who could ever say? — that makes tattoos meaningful. The tattoo that I’ve decided to get is how I’ve chosen to spend a portion of my body that I never had any right to expect.

The joy of missing out, indeed.

Note — Why skin is not canvas

In this blog post, I deliberately avoid using the word “canvas” or referring to my skin as “canvas space”. I avoid the word “canvas” because it has the danger of falling into racial discrimination. This danger is well expressed by sociologist and tattoer Dustin Kiskaddon in his book Blood and Lightning: On Becoming a Tattooer:

[Tattooers on tattoo TV shows] occasionally voiced preference for light-toned “canvas,” too. One contestant on Ink Master explained, “My ideal canvas would be, like, paper-white skin.” Another said, “I don’t want the dark canvases,” while adding, “They take away half your skill set. My stuff is dark and creepy, and I don’t want to go that dark on dark skin.” This second tattooer concluded, “This is not the canvas for me.”

Such statements wouldn’t feel racist if they were made by a painter, for instance, who declared preference for one type of canvas over another. Skin is, technically speaking, a different material than canvas, but it’s also different on the cultural front. Human skin has been granted significant meaning. […]

The crux of the matter is simple: people aren’t canvases. Describing them as such employs a metaphor that might encourage the potential for racial discrimination. It also flattens the great complexity of tattoo labor. A tattooer told me, “You know, those shows describe people as ‘canvases.’ Thing is, the people you tattoo are people, you don’t get to work with canvas. I hate that ‘human canvas’ shit!”

Racial discrimination in tattooing is certainly no joke. There is a myth among many white tattoo artists that dark skin is inherently more difficult to tattoo. This is, of course, ridiculous — people with all skin tones have been getting tattoos all around the world for thousands of years, from the Pacific Islands, to Africa, to mainland Asia, to south-east Asia, to eastern Europe, to North America, to the Roman empire.

Jason Jeffries explores racial discrimination in his 2017 thesis Underneath the Surface: African American Religion and Tattoo Culture:

“Nathan,” a manager of a black-owned tattoo shop, expressed the myth that black skin does not take color is racist. He claims that the reason behind this myth is white tattoo artists traditionally only used primary colors when tattooing white clients. […] Nathan argues that many white tattoo artists never attempted to adjust their methods to make a suitable tattoo on adarker canvas. One tattoo artist who works in a small, independentstudio, “Sam Jones,” concurs […] you have to consider the canvas and adjust your composition sothat the art will be visible from a particular distance. With darker skin, you just have more contrast in the artwork so that it is visible from a farther distance. In addition to paying attention to contrast on darker skin, many tattoo artists prefer to tattoo larger pieces, compose larger images, focus of significant detail and use fewer lines in thec reation of the tattoo. This method has been quickly recognized by non-black artists and utilized on all ethnic groups, including whites.