A Ballers Tattoo; Or, On Permanence
I arrived right after the shop opened and was sixth or seventh on the sign-in sheet. Pastime Tattoo’s artists and stations were already full; one local TV station was just leaving and another would arrive later.
It wasn’t like this when I got my first tattoo, some 15 years ago, late at night in a Midwest college town. Here were interviews; the team’s social media was tagging people; a fan had driven in from Sacramento. My son wandered around the lobby trying to decide which tat was “the most best” and “the scariest,” with nothing in the middle, and the winner (read: both) was this demonic candy corn.
Courtesy @PastimeTattoo
My tattoo matches my father’s, a shamrock on the hip, and it wasn’t really my choice. If I was going to get a first tattoo in the good grace of my family, it had to be this. Call it tradition, heritage, a desperate plea for the (un)luck of the Irish. But this new one, now that I’m 40, is entirely for me. Maybe, in 15 years, when the Ballers have won 15 straight championships, my son will be here getting one to match.
While I waited—and it was good to wait—I scanned the other available art and pondered whether to pair my green block B with an Alfred E. Neuman rendition of Jesus, a topless (and, actually, bottomless) Betty Boop, a tombstone with the quip of my choice—Life Sucks, Live Fast, Die Hard, Oh Shit, It Me, and He Gone—and the devil, Death, and a collection of snakes (definitely the worst of the bunch). Maybe next time.
The tattoo itself took only 30 minutes in the skilled hands of Ben Verhoek. That he’s a big B’s fan helped; that he showed me the tattoo his then-six-year-old did on him made it even better. It’s my favorite one, he said. We talked favorite snacks at Raimondi and about the next homestand. I gave an interview to the local news—yes, no autographs please, I am that famous. My son, who at home had been terrified by the mere concept of a needle going into dada, was mesmerized by the process—this my wife’s genius; the pokey machine was a “magic pen”—and the entire shop, which he called walking inside a comic book.
And then it was over. I loved the ink, the camaraderie, and the characteristically warm vibe the B’s create wherever they go. But I’m no Casey Pratt, doing a whole B’s Cast interview while getting a much bigger tattoo. I had to go home, eye my very own B and collect my thoughts. I had never questioned getting this tattoo, and truth be told, was planning to pay for one myself (so extra thanks, team). So why do I feel this way—so sure, so seen— about a team in its second year of existence? Why make this be my second tattoo ever?
The haters will say, worst comes to worst, I can change this B into something else in the long and illustrious tradition of rehabilitated tattoos: mum to mud, love to lorv, peace sign turns wagon wheel, make love not wart. Maybe I’ll end up loving Ballerinas. Supporting the Bratislava Battling Barges. Maybe I’ll just go all-in on Barfing. Or I’ll flash it at my students as-is, an intimidation display to tell them I give only B’s…
But I am pretty damn sure I won’t need to. Everything tells me our Ballers are here to stay. And I just put my money where my mouth is—or, at least, the ink where my skin is.
We can think about permanence as plain forever. This will be on my body till the end. In this thinking, you’re my mom,
and plenty of good moms and dads and smart and reasonable people out there. Is anything special enough for eternity? How do you decide? What if you regret this? Or, we can think about it as capturing a moment, a little fragmentary piece of forever, and this I prefer. It can be imperfect and unremarkable; it is made meaningful by the leap of faith making it so. I often work with students reading Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use,” in which a family must decide whether their heritage is an art to be preserved or an action to be practiced. As I sat today, shader buzzing on my arm, I wasn’t thinking about curating a museum of my life but rather marking a map, just one turn toward a destination gratefully unknown.
Our memories have vexing ways of changing over time. We famously end up remembering a remembering; we tell a telling more comfortable than the truth. But this B will be with me exactly as it was here on this marine layer morning at the corner of East 14th and Joaquin in San Leandro. I may forget misspelling my own name on my release form, fretting about it and re-doing it. I will hopefully remember the other fans describing for each other what had brought them here: believing in the team and its mission, feeling a part of something more than just baseball, wanting to show a tat of Scrappy to Scrappy. And I’m trying in all of these dispatches to make permanent, in digital ink, the contours and shading of being a B’s fan.
So I will without question remember the Ballers being the best team in baseball right now. I will remember that this season felt special from the start no matter how it ends, and that this was the moment I fully bought into a team and a fan-ily after not being sure I was ever capable of doing that again.
Or, at least, Joseph Norton did.
