Part 1: Tom's summary
On a cloudy day in the middle of July a few years back, I walk into a Kingscliff tattoo parlour on the far northern NSW coast and hold out my wrist.
“Can you do me a small platypus and the word ‘beyond’?”
The young guy behind the counter looks at me completely without judgement even though I’m probably the least likely client he’s had all year.
He can. He does. Want to see it? It’s my second tiny tattoo, and I love it.
It's very freshly inked in this pic but over time, as is often the case, it's had its share of problems.
One night in a pub a while back, a friend glanced at the word poking out from my rolled-up sleeve and asked why I'd tattooed the word “legend” on my own wrist, and this had us sideways for long minutes.
Another friend looked at it upside down and thought it said “legal.”
Mum and dad read “loyal.”
These are all reasonable words but not exactly what I was going for… font matters :)
As for the platypus, when it was stencilled onto my skin I’d apparently been holding my wrist taut and it looked great – long and lean like a platypus should. But by the time it was inked, my wrist had relaxed a bit and the effect is… chubby. A chubby platypus.
Relatable.
“So does this tattoo have a meaning?” asks the unsuspecting tattoo guy, who has already told me all about the house he and his fiancé had saved up for and bought at Murwillumbah. It was wiped out in the epic Tweed Valley floods of 2022 - the second "once in a century" flood event in five years.
He's told me his story so I tell him mine.
“Okay so it's about how when we're in 'business as usual mode', we miss all the things that are just beyond our attention,” I explain while maintaining a ‘business as usual’ approach to how much tattoo needles hurt.
“Like we really tend to only focus on what's right in front of us, so we can miss quite a lot...both hopeful things and sobering things. "Beyond" is just a reminder to look a bit deeper."
"Okay cool," says Tom. "And the platypus?"
"Well the story is - have you heard this before? - when the first platypus was sent to the British Museum, it was originally dismissed as a hoax. They thought some botanist with a wild sense of humour had just glued bits of duck and beaver together for a laugh…. But actually the sum of these weird parts is this fascinating creature with attributes you wouldn’t believe. And somehow it just... works. Which is like people, and life... if you look beyond the surface."
Tom looks at me, pausing in his work.
“Okay so it’s about wondering about contradictory things outside our own immediate experience, that’s cool,” he says.
“I would’ve chosen an alien to represent that, but I like how you’ve gone for a platypus that actually exists in nature; reminds you that you have to look closer and keep an eye out for the things you don't necessarily expect.”
Nice. (Okay yes agreed, Tom's summary is better than mine.)
Anyway, that's what the platypus tattoo is about. Just a constant reminder to ask: What's the other angle here? What might I be missing? And how do apparent contradictions hold together?
Thinking this way is actually quite hard work. I am not very good at it. More on that later.
Tune in tomorrow for Part 2 which I've called "Not Throwing Up on Tom".
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