I have no tattoos. I will probably never have any tattoos. My mother has one, my girlfriend has two, but I personally would not get one. If for no other reason, I wouldn’t want a permanent marking on my body. Maybe someday I’ll change my mind but as of now, I’m tat-free.
However, I constantly have dreams in which I get a tattoo, then regret it later. In the cases that I can remember, they are always weird/bad tattoos. Last night I dreamed that I got a tattoo of some slogan on my right arm with a rectangular border around it. A few months ago, I dreamed that I got a tattoo of Beavis and Butt-Head. There have been many more that I can’t remember. In all these cases, I have no recollection of atually getting the tattoo applied, and I always regret the tattoo and wish that I did not have it.
I’ve never had tattoo dreams, but I’d wager that the whole “feeling of regret” thing comes from some deep-seated subconscious regret you have about…well, who knows. Dreams are weird like that, they allow us to feel things we’re too afraid to connect with in our waking life.
As for the real world, I considered getting a tattoo once – of Raphael, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. Giving the finger. (I was big into TMNT at the time, and Rafael was the “angry young turtle”, so…heh.) The tattoo artist was all set to do it, I just had to give him a design to work from, and I never got around to it. I shudder now, to think of how I’d feel if I actually put that thing on my arm. :eek:
I’ve never had the tattoo dream, but I have had ‘regret’ dreams. The plot changes over where I am in life, but the central theme is always that I have done something irreversible that has screwed up my life. I see them as cautionary tales, and I love the feeling in the morning when you realize they are just a dream and you didn’t actually screw up.
Here are some of my regret dreams:
In college I would have a dream that I committed a crime like bank robbery and then I would be thinking “what have I done, I’m going to get caught, I have trashed my future.” Then I’d wake up and be relieved.
When I quit smoking, I would have dreams where I would smoke and I’d think, “What have I done!?”
I’ve had dreams where I cheat on my wife and I think, “Oh my God, I’ve ruined my marriage!”
Then I wake up from my dreams and it is the best feeling in the world.
I have tattoos that I now regret getting. For many years I hid them from my
poor mother (because I knew that it’d break her heart that her son had defiled
himself in this way) and I constantly had dreams where I’d be at a family gathering
and I would have trouble hiding my tattoos for some reason (which are on my
biceps and upper shoulder). For instance I’d have no shirt on in the dream and my mom wouldn’t notice the tattoos but I’d be terrified that she would and I’d search
frantically for a shirt to cover them up but would be unable to find one. I had
dreams like these all the time. Then, this last Christmas, I was wearing a T shirt
where the sleeve sort of got rolled up high enough for my mom to notice one of
the tattoos, she mentioned it, sort of shook her head, and that was it. She never
mentioned it again, and after that I never had the dream again.