Dear Kid,

I’ve been thinking. (Scary, I know.)

Who thought of the first tattoo?

The very, very first one?

Tattoos have been around forever (that’s the technical term for a really, really, really long time).

But who first thought, “Hey, I bet it would be fun to stab myself with something unsanitary in the hope that it will leave a permanent mark on my skin!”?

I get (not) how the next Neanderthal might think, “Well, if Joe is going to jab himself enough to scream like a little girl and end up with a badly drawn sabretooth tiger on his butt, then I want to do that too.”

But what on earth would have possessed Joe to stab himself in the first place?

Did he fall on a sabretooth porcupine quill that just happened to be sitting in raspberry juice?

Did Mrs. Joe Neanderthal wake up one morning and think “Gee, rather than trying to figure out how to feed all the little Neanderthals today, I think I’ll convince Joe to get a dancing hula girl on his bicep.”?

Did the little Neanderthals have trouble remembering which one was their Dad and decide to try to put an identifying mark on him (accidentally inventing the genre of body art)?

Our textbooks are suspiciously silent on the topic of The Very First Tattoo. It’s almost as if they don’t know exactly who got the first tramp stamp.

Ridiculous, but there you are.

Love, Mom