I Got The World's Dumbest Tramp Stamp (At 50)! Look And See If You Can Possibly Disagree
PLUS: Jane's giving away heaps of amazing new clothes! Get ready to grab your favorite items!
Hello, still from Malibu!
Whenever I come out here, we end up extending my stay by days and weeks and sometimes three months. Mostly because being with a best friend is the best. And when your other best friend is in town also and can come over for dinner and sake often, come on, what could really be better than that? You tell me (in the comments, as always)!
I moved locations on the property the other night when Ed Sheeran stayed over, if anyone cares for another little drop of a name there. (I am trusting the sincerity of those of you who said you do enjoy my name drops. The rest of you, please please complain in the comments because I'm a little uncomfortable doing it anyway and I am happy to stop if majority rules!) I met Ed when he was here working on his first record. I've seen him in New York many times after that, including one visit where he gave my little Charlotte a two dollar bill that she kept until just the other day when she really needed money and so she spent it. Which is reminiscent of when Michael Jackson (quite possibly my ultimate name drop, though controversial) gave me a cookie with his face on it while we were visiting his special little bakery house at Neverland Ranch and I brought it back to New York and put it in my freezer where it sat for years until one night around 3 am when I had such bad munchies that I ate it. Like mother like daughter. Pragmatism rules. Also, Ed is purely lovely. And in excellent physical shape. He uses the gym here and I most certainly don't.
Here is what I do instead: Lie around and pet dogs and eat and drink and talk a LOT and work a lot too and write back and forth with you guys still constantly and be happy, as evidenced below.
OK, good news for you all, I think, is that we are releasing a new vastly expanded line of merchandise that is all because of your specific requests for what you need:
Florida reader who said you never wear anything with sleeves, we made your tank! Those of you who, like me, said you prefer to be covered up (arms especially - and who like to tweak your skin exposure levels constantly based on your body temps which change all the friggin’ time) - for us we made a zip up hoodie! Plus much much more! I thought I was going to debut them all here today but the amazing Ani, my gorgeous and gorgeous-hearted partner in creative crime, and I are still finalizing, and I didn’t want to wait to post Robin’s excellent story below because it’s fun and I think you will really like it.
So a few short days from now, I will show you the fruits of your and our labor. And to celebrate and thank you for the inspiration, I will be giving away new items to those of you who upgrade your subscriptions or just make an argument for why you deserve something new and great. (I mean, you all deserve that and so much more, but all you will have to do is ask essentially.) Details and explanation to come.
I love you all so so so so so so much! Even more than I love being here in Malibu and that's saying a lot.
Xoxox Jane
By Robin Wheeler
Please, in an effort to protect me from myself, don’t dare me to do something. At heart I’m still a rough and tumble ten-year-old who spent too much time running the neighborhood with the three older boys who lived next door.
“Hey Robin! Dare you to climb that giant pile of fill dirt!”
Dirt Mountain? Climbed.
“I bet you can’t run 50 circles while pulling a Radio Flyer wagon without falling down!”
Wagon? Circled.
While my abilities have changed, my attitude has not. The best way to get me to do something is to somehow make it forbidden. This is how my quest for the world’s dumbest tramp stamp began in New Orleans, as many dumb quests do, in 2023.
“Robin,” I said. “You are a 50-year-old heavily tattooed woman with a bare lower back. Bet you’re not brave enough to tattoo something really stupid back there that flaunts societal conventions and mocks the concept of mid-century womanhood.”
Let’s back up a bit to how I became one of many heavily-tattooed middle-aged people after generations of tattoos being taboo.
I got my first tattoo on the day Allen Ginsberg died in 1997. Why did I want a tattoo? I thought they were pretty, and I love new experiences. Pissing off people who need to be pissed off was a nice perk, too.
I was 24 and spent five years trying to find the perfect poppy design for my upper left arm. I planned a quarter-sized bright orange single bloom but Spyder, the tattooist preparing to defile my virgin skin, nudged me into expanding it to a fist-sized pair of poppies. For $75 and the time it took to play the soundtrack to David Lynch’s “Lost Highway,” I became the most colorful of clichés—a tattooed Gen Xer.
“Growing up mired in disordered eating that continued as I grew to be a fat adult, my body art helped me love my body. Which became a body that endured multiple ruptured ovarian cysts, 34 hours of labor with five failed epidurals, an emergency c-section, another drug failure before I was fully stitched, a month-long antibiotic-resistant staph infection in the incision, and a year of postpartum depression and anxiety.”
I waited a decade before getting my next tattoo—a quarter-sleeve of violets symbolizing my kid’s birthdate. Violets are the flower for their birthmonth, and the bouquet’s blooms correspond with their birthdate. At the bottom, a clump of black dangly roots to symbolize family.
And so it went for many years as I amassed a curated collection of body art, all flowers assigned to people I cherished and events that shaped my life. My left arm is covered in a sleeve of floral art, those first two poppies still visible just below my shoulder. There’s a Rose of Sharon on my right inner wrist for my favorite character in my favorite novel, “The Grapes of Wrath,” and a jar of my grandmother’s gooseberry jam surrounded by the berries and their blossoms on my calf. Two years after having both knees replaced, I had bright bouquets tied with pink and blue ribbons tattooed over the Frankenstein scars.
By the time I turned 50 I was heavily tattooed with no regrets … and no lower back tattoo, which I considered a point of pride. No reviled tramp stamp for me. I had plenty of beautiful, well-planned tattoos that, according to my mother, would be more at home in frames on a gallery wall. To which I replied, “Ew! You wanna frame my skin? That’s SICK!” Even my one silly tattoo, which I call my big dumb Wilco tattoo, took years of planning because if I was going against my better judgement and getting a band tattoo, I wanted to make sure it was on par with my other pieces.
I take my tattoos seriously. Growing up mired in disordered eating that continued as I grew up to be a fat adult, my body art helped me love my body. Which eventually became a body that endured multiple ruptured ovarian cysts, pregnancy, 34 hours of labor with five failed epidurals, an emergency c-section, another drug failure before I was fully stitched, a month-long antibiotic-resistant staph infection in the incision, and a year of postpartum depression and anxiety that came closer to killing me than anything else.
I got my second tattoo not long after that. It took three hours and in the process I discovered that, while the first 20 minutes hurt like I was being set ablaze, after that I felt euphoric, a feeling I rarely experienced elsewhere. It felt good to be in my body.
The beauty of my tattoos gave me a way to learn how to love how my body looked for the first time in my life. The pain gave me a way to work through anguish I’d bottled up for years. Getting tattooed meant feeling the pain, working through it, and feeling wonderful at the end before taking a couple of weeks to heal and nourish the new skin that grew to replace what the tattoo destroyed. In a life with a body that often felt out of control, tattoos gave me a sense of power over a body that had so often betrayed me, and it didn’t hurt anyone in the process.
But what’s the fun in that?
In February, 2023—four months after I turned 50—my best friend Suzie and I went to New Orleans. She’s even more heavily tattooed than me. On the plane she showed me the website for Electric Ladyland, a tattoo shop near our suite in the Marigny neighborhood, just far enough from the French Quarter to deter a bit of the drunk tourist traffic. Suzie planned to get a little souvenir ink if the shop had time for a walk-in.
I had no interest in getting an impulse tattoo. They weren’t my thing. Besides, in a month I would be visiting my favorite artist in Chicago to finish my sleeve. I’d get my fix soon enough. Living vicariously through Suzie was fine with me.
Still, I browsed the portfolios on the shop's website. Among the old school hearts, skulls, and swallows, a blast of candy pink grabbed my attention. And I knew I would't be leaving New Orleans with a bare lower back. Because I had just found exactly what I didn't know I needed.
“Suzie! I need the world’s dumbest tramp stamp!”
And as any bestie worth the title should do, she assured me that this was the greatest idea I’d ever had. [And as any pushy editor worth the title would do, I got wind of a possible addition to this idea from Robin and said she had better do it AND document it all here for you. You are most welcome. - Sleazy Jane]
That night Suzie got her souvenir tattoo while I sat in our suite, eating a muffuletta and thinking about that damned tattoo design. I was joking when I said I needed the world’s dumbest tramp stamp. I cackled every time we talked about it because it sounded so stupid. But I hadn’t put enough thought into it, or pondered the deeper meaning of what putting this tattoo permanently on my lower back would mean.
It would mean I had a bitchin’ time in New Orleans. And someday, maybe, a medical examiner might get a kick out of it.
I stepped away from my thoughtful, curated tattoos and said fuck it. Life is ridiculous. Get that stupid tattoo.
Joel Van Goor, the artist behind the tattoo, has a portfolio filled with colorful vintage cartoon-style designs, like anthropomorphic cocktails, little citrus fruits on knuckles, a voluptuously melty slice of pizza with pepperoni nipples … This man is a genius! His style didn’t necessarily fit my floral tattoos, but it fit something more important—my personality at age 50—in a way I’d never seen from another artist.
My New Orleans impulse souvenir tattoo wasn’t done on a wild Bourbon Street Saturday night. It happened early on a Monday afternoon in the back of FiFi’s Bywater Beauty Parlour. Suzie brought me an iced latte from the neighboring cafe and, in less than two mostly pain-free hours, Joel created the tramp stamp I’d been dreaming of for a whole 48 hours. In orange, not pink, because I love anything that tastes like St. Joseph’s baby aspirin.
It is glorious.
It is ridiculous.
It is all mine.
TO SEE THE WORLD’S DUMBEST TRAMP STAMP, TALK TO ROBIN IN THE COMMENTS ABOUT HOW SHE FEELS ABOUT IT NOW AND BERATE ME FOR PUSHING ROBIN TO DO THIS, SUBSCRIBE HERE! YOU CAN USE THE FREE TRIAL OPTION I JUST ADDED SO YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE TO PAY ANYTHING….
