Now, fast forward four years: I was fifteen years old, walking down the hall on my way to class, and a girl I knew from my civics class was standing at her locker. As I walked up to say hi, she bent down to pick up her backpack, her shirt rode up slightly, and for a second I glimpsed a tattoo on her lower back. It was just a simple, lower back tribal piece, but instantly my Nicaraguan concept of tattoos came back. I wasn’t as shocked as I would’ve been when I was ten, obviously. I was pretty much caught in the middle – I didn’t know whether to freak out about it or to think it was cool. Tattooed people were insane, homicidal rapists who came after you the second you let go of your mommy’s hand, right? But she wasn’t an insane, homicidal rapist. She was actually really friendly and fun to talk to. Besides, the tattoo wasn’t a yucky, fading, bluish hue, it was black, the outlines were perfect, and it actually looked really pretty. Evidently, at ten years old I hadn’t really kno wn the difference between a crappy homemade tattoo and one done by a professional. I guess you could say that this was officially my very first positive tattoo experience.

After that, seeing a tattoo was the same as seeing someone with a faceful of piercings – interesting, but not overly shocking. I pretty much put them out of my head. I had a ton of other problems to worry about. But, obviously, tattoos would come back into my life later on.

One lovely summer day, a little over a year after my first positive tattoo experience, and not long before my imminent return to Nicaragua, I was walking around the downtown area with a friend, and we decided to go into the tattoo parlor to check it out. She told me the place we were going into had a really bad reputation, and nobody should get tattooed or pierced there – and for thirty bucks a tattoo, I perfectly understood why. So we went up some stairs and walked into a small, messily painted white room filled with a strong, unpleasant scent. I’m not quite sure what the smell was, but I know it wasn't supposed to smell like that. They used that same yucky, fluorescent lighting you see in school bathrooms that makes you look slightly washed out and pale, like you’re about to throw up, and the shop stock hung haphazardly all over the walls. As we studied the obnoxious skulls, roses, and hearts, we could hear a tattoo machine buzzing behind a makeshift wall made out of what looked like large sheets of Styrofoam. No one came out to greet us, not even to yell at us for being underage and in their shop without an adult. The place made me horribly uncomfortable, like one of those rooms in scary movies where the bad guy straps you down to a chair and pulls out your teeth with pliers. I was not impressed.

Still, the idea of tattoos stayed with me. I wanted one. Badly.