Having tattoos used to mean something in the US. It meant, for example, that you were a bad muthafucka, a gangsta, a pimp, an outlaw, a thug. All this was over long before I got my first tattoo in the late 90s, by which time having a tattoo meant only that I still had enough credit with my friends that I could borrow $75 to get my first tattoo in some dude’s apartment who I’d just met and who had no qualms whatsoever about giving a bunch of minors tattoos and who used an autoclave from the 1970s to sterilize his needles.

The whole ethos about tattoos in the States seemed to start to really change in the early 90s around the same time that suburban moms started getting boob jobs. The other thing they started getting was tattoos of Warner Bothers characters. Because what better accent for a brand new pair of Cs than a nice Tasmanian Devil tattoo? And I think that was really the end of tattoos signifying anything like badass thuggish gangsta pimp shit in the States. Today, your basic tattooed dude is way more likely to be an accountant, insurance adjuster, or real estate agent than an ex-con, gangsta, or pimp. Nowadays teenage girls get matching tattoos with their moms.

But not in country. Apparently, tattoos haven’t gone mainstream in Vietnam the way they have in the States. Which doesn’t mean you don’t see a lot of people with badass tattoos. You do. They’re all over the place. Party girls with lacy party girl tattoos on their backs. More rough and ready chicks with neck tattoos. Then there are the guys who are really tatted the fuck up. By which I mean these dudes look hard. The kind of hard that the accountants, insurance adjusters, and real estate agents can only fantasize about ever looking. This is because the tattooed people in country really are bad muthafuckas, gangstas, pimps, etc. You can just tell they are not to be fucked with. They are the kind of people who stand up to the entire American military machine and all its fury and say, “Get off my lawn.”

And because I want people to think I’m a bad muthafucka too, I’m looking around thinking, I gotta get tatted up, know what I’m saying dawg? And Gina’s all like trying to be frugal and so she suggests that we save some money on the ink by just tattooing the parts of me that would be visible when I have my shirt lifted up the way the gangstas and pimps here do it because that’s all anyone would ever see anyway. And it’s clear that Gina doesn’t understand me or my needs because if I didn’t do the full torso tattoo the massage chicks definitely would see it and they would know for sure that I wasn’t a gangsta or a pimp or an otherwise bad muthafucka, which is all I’ve ever wanted.