When I grew up I was taught to believe that only sailors, carnies, and inmates got tattoos. The fact that the only person I really knew with a tattoo was my Navy veteran grandfather and the next person I knew who got a tattoo was my then-sailor brother bolstered that thinking.

That soon changed, of course. I’m not sure when societal hangups about tattoos began to recede, but in my experience it became a hell of a lot more common to see ink on normies like me in the late 90s and into the 2000s. In the past 10-15 years I am pretty sure that the number of new people I’ve met and have gotten to know who have tattoos has greatly exceeded the number of people I’ve met who do not. Maybe that just tells you more about who I hang out with these days compared to before — I married a woman who had like a dozen of them at the time and who has since more than doubled that number — but the overall trends are obvious.

Despite that, I never got one. Until Saturday afternoon, that is, when I got this on my left forearm:

This was partially inspired by the name of the newsletter which provides me with me living. It was partially inspired by my love of coffee. It was partially inspired by a photo of a coffee cup I took in a diner like a decade ago and which I’ve always been fond of for a host of personal and aesthetic reasons. But it was mostly inspired by the fact that I’ve just sorta wanted a tattoo for a while and, after a long time trying to think of something I could get which TRULY MEANS SOMETHING AND SAYS SOMETHING IMPORTANT ABOUT ME, I realized that, nah, they don’t have to mean anything apart from “I like that thing.”

For those keeping score:

• My wife Allison: Something like 25-30 tattoos; I’ve lost count and I’m pretty sure she has too;
• My son Carlo: Three tattoos, all since he turned 18 last summer;
• Me: One tattoo, and probably counting now that I’ve broken the seal; and
• My daughter Anna: Zero tattoos, at least as far as I know, and I’m really not interested in asking, not that I think she’d tell me anyway.

I know I’ll never catch Allison. I probably won’t manage to keep up with Carlo either. Anna has the luxury of being 30 years younger than me so she can start way later and still have a chance of beating me if she decides to, but at least I won’t lose via a shutout.

What should I get next?