The skin as the canvas of each person's life. But also as the expression of an era. Hence, in this time marked by the permanent exhibition of oneself, the tattoo has become the master of the body. Be perfect and teach yourself: braces and tattoos. This is how the modern man and woman are summarized. The best definition of a nobody today is someone who doesn't have braces on their teeth, that's what they used to be called, or defaced skin. But time works against tattoos. Also of the teeth, even if they are perfect as in the texts of the bell tower poets. The turning of the clock is especially cruel to the love motives that one engraves on one's skin.
Life takes a turn, it takes you to other arms and other dreams, and there the doodle remains forever as a symbol of already failed passion. The only tattoo that reaches from the cradle to the grave is the now extinct Mother's Love. Too identified with prison yards to gain likes on Instagram.
Johnny Depp, already rehabilitated and back on the big screen, once got a tattoo of Winona forever. An understandable decision that I would have copied if Mrs. Ryder had preferred me instead of her.
My victory came with his defeat. While my pectoral remains unscathed, Depp's is now an apology for drunkenness. When their love ran out, Jack Sparrow modified his tattoo. He shortened it to leave it in Wino forever and get rid of the memory of the actress. Wino is the man who goes from cogorza to cogorza drinking cheap wine packaged in cardboard.
Tattoos, like those who wear them, can have many lives. And as the saying goes, forgetting a bad friend and a bad love is better. Only the tattoo of true love, the one that everyone sings about but only a few achieve, deserves to accompany one until the end.
That is why we have been moved this week by Messi, already retired in the US, as Jordi Basté says, explaining in an interview that his tuned tattoo on his left leg, in which a Barça shield stands out, wants to be the expression of love for the club that has made him who he is. As feelings are made to abound in exaggeration, let's say that marking one's skin in 2023 with the Blaugrana shield is a recognition that everything that Messi lives and will live in the sporting field dwarfs and will dwarf the strength, truth and intensity of what has already been experienced.
Having remade our lives, with new idols in the field with which we already have enough in Europe according to Joanjo Pallàs – optimism! –, it is the best time for the most serene and therefore also the most sincere pampering. To know that for Messi we are the same as the sugary Barry White sang: My first, my last, my everything. Long live love!
