Sweet Yet Sour

Number 8 – My Tattoo

Saturday, August 2nd, 2008 | Weird Things

I have a tattoo that I got in 3rd grade.  I was young and I got it without parental consent, but I didn’t have any choice.

One day while we had some free time in Mr. Smith’s 3rd grade class, my friend Torrey and I were playing pencil wars.  I’m not sure if everyone else did this in elementary school, but we played pencil wars a lot.  One of you holds your pencil horizontally between each hand and the other person uses their pencil to flick and attempt to break your pencil.

It’s not so much a test of pencil strength as it is a test of knowing how and where to flick the pencil so that the other pencil will break.  My mom always wondered why I came home with broken or really short pencils – I knew better than to explain that I was wasting pencils playing games with the boys.

As luck would have it, I won the pencil war that day and was able to break Torrey’s pencil in half.  Unfortunately for me, Torrey was a sore loser.  In a fit of anger, he used the pointy end of his broken pencil to stab me in the elbow.

The pencil tip broke skin and actually stayed stuck in my elbow.  Mr. Smith was busy with another kid at the time, and I was a pretty tough girl, so I just stayed at my seat and watched my elbow bleed until he was done.

When Mr. Smith was free I calmly walked up to him, asked for a band-aid and showed him my bleeding elbow.  I was whisked to the nurse’s office, where she was unable to remove the pencil tip, and Torrey was taken to the bad kid corner.

The result of this is my only tattoo, a small black mark on my right elbow.  It’s difficult to find in amongst the freckles, but it’s there and I’m proud of it – I got it after winning an epic battle when I was only 9 years old…

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