Hooked up with this really cute twink at the start of the year, cute face (could be a model honestly), perfect body (I like them twinky but with some decent amount of fat all around, so not too chubby but not too skinny either), perfect skin, highly horny every time we met. The third time we met, he had gone to a party the previous night, and he told with eyes full of regret of the tattoo he had gotten on his right wrist. A terrible small drawing of two champagne glasses clinking, particle effects as dashed lines visible between them, liquid inside slightly wavy and angled to match each glass and simulate the physics of the action. "It's bad isn't it? I don't know what I was thinking. I got so drunk and my friend just convinced me to do it. They even recorded a video of it." He then shows me the video. His friend, a blonde girl, shows her own matching tattoo on her wrist. "She said having the same tattoo would be proof of our friendship. I don't know what I was thinking. My mom is going to kill me."

He is looking for reassurance, "it's not that bad," or something of the sort. Well, I don't like lying to people, but there's no need to be rude. "It doesn't look that good, yea, but you can always remove it, it's pretty small and it's on your wrist, so even if it leaves a mark it won't be visible." This is about as reassuring as I can be. If they were some small stars, like , I wouldn't say it's good, but it's also not bad, definitely no need to remove it. But champagne glasses? It's just in such poor taste. "I don't know if I'll remove it... I don't want to disappoint my friend, but my mom..." and then we went back and forth on this for a while.

I made my opinion pretty clear: no one gets a tattoo in a good time in their lives, it's always when they're lost and aimless, which he was, as he was just partying and getting fucked in the ass by strangers (me); and pretty much everyone who gets a tattoo has an absent father, which... I'm not sure if he had actually. On our second meeting we went out to get something to eat and when it came time to pay he called his father to get him to send the money via PIX, and I'm like, dude, you don't need to do that I'll pay. He then tells me every time he wants to buy something he asks his dad like this because he has no self-control and can't manage money properly, and his dad always obliges. Is this an absent father? Maybe an enabling father, with the only real force in the house being his mom, which is why he focuses on her ire when she learns of the tattoo.

Well, anyway, I don't know what his mom did to him, he went back to his city and we never met again. In terms of location, the wrist is probably one of the least worst places to have a tattoo. I have a theory that the closer someone's tattoo is to their intimate parts, the bigger the red flag. This works especially well for women, as a "red flag" for men is basically, this guy gets fucked by 20 different tops a night and is host to 10 concurrently mutating diseases, those kinds of guys are extremely easy to notice and avoid.

But with women it's harder to tell, so you need markers, and tattoos closer to the pelvic area are one great heuristic. These heuristics are especially important for me because, well, I'm a mixed man in Brazil. In case you didn't know, if you're mixed or black in Brazil that's an instant dating debuff, most women want the standard white guy with the slick hair, not a brown guy with the shaved head who looks like he's from a favela. But there's a niche of girls who go for guys like me, and inside that niche some girls find me really attractive, which can attract some obsessive behaviors. So I have to defend myself by not sleeping around that much — which by itself is a good decision overall, since sleeping around, especially with women, deals some serious damage to the fabric of society — but also by filtering across various heuristics that seem to work well to avoid pulling some girl that will ruin my life (not again).

Anyway, the real tragedy is that the poor twink bought the tattoo top:

It's clear now that the tattoo bubble is popping and I think that's a good thing. In the same way some people think fat people are an eyesore and they should lose weight, I think most tattoos are an eyesore that shouldn't exist. Maybe in 1 in 20 people who have a tattoo actually have something that's tastefully done, the rest are all garbage, and usually the ones who do it right tend to be artists themselves, which makes sense, as they have an eye for proper aesthetics. Does this mean I hate everyone with a tattoo? That I wish they would all die? That I wouldn't date someone with one? No! I love all human beings, truly, it's just a very small opinion in the grand scheme of things.

But were I an enterprising man, if I didn't have to play safe with the money I do have, I'd look into getting in on this early stage of the tattoo removal bull market to come, it's clear as day it will keep growing as the years pass. Do you actually need new shops for this or can common tattoo shops provide both services? I think it's the former. Yea, I mean, it wouldn't even make sense. What kind of message would it send if you offered both tattoo application and tattoo removal services simultaneously? Well, such concerns don't concern me but an imaginary me who has more money to invest. I need to stop procrastinating and release more games.