In the past six months, I’ve gotten four new tattoos and a piercing. If you consult my Pinterest board, you’ll see I’m also contemplating getting an outline of my late dog’s head and a tiny UFO, as well as a nose stud.
Depending on how charitable you’re feeling, I’m either expressing myself or in the throes of a raging midlife crisis.
The spree began around my 40th birthday and first anniversary without alcohol, when I visited a tattoo artist named Frank — better known as the Mad Tatter — to get a delicate, fine-line snake inked on my right wrist.
I’d been through the wringer the previous year. I’d sold my PR agency, had an emotional breakdown, quit drinking, explored psychedelic healing, written my first novel, and started building a more flexible professional life. I’d successfully kept my two children alive (thriving, even) and rebooted my marriage after a rough patch. It was also the end of the Year of the Snake, a symbol of shedding, rebirth, and emerging from something changed.
Crucially, I also thought the tattoo would look pretty badass.
That combination of meaning and aesthetics is generally how my tattoo decisions work. I consider an idea, pull a few references, and sit with it briefly. Then something clicks: Yep, that’s it. Let’s roll.
I don’t belabor the decisions, which is part of the appeal.
After the snake, I convinced my husband, Ethan, to get matching “So Long” tattoos — a reference to “So Long You Pretty Thing” by Spiritualized, a song he introduced me to that gradually became ours. During the same appointment, I added a solar system to my left forearm. My daughter now treats it as a party trick, asking to see “Saturn, your favorite planet, Mom,” when we’re in a room with someone new.
Not long afterward, we returned for Joshua Tree tattoos. Then we dragged our kids to a piercing studio on a Sunday afternoon, where I added a third hole to my left ear and Ethan got his first earring.
By then, it was officially a thing.
I’d gotten tattoos before. At 22, I chose a small star on my left wrist. A few years later, my best friend and I got astrological symbols on our rib cages. Then came an “S” for my dog Salinger, tucked against my other rib cage.
I still like those tattoos, but they’re discreet and easily covered. My newer tattoos stretch across my wrists and forearms, and are therefore impossible to ignore. The shift feels telling: These days, I’m less inclined to keep the stranger parts of myself stashed neatly out of sight.
For years, alcohol was how I coaxed those parts into view, or so I believed.
I spent most of my late teens and adulthood believing my impulsivity and love of a good time — and my ability to put away drinks — were what made me interesting. Booze turned off the part of my brain that catalogued other people’s reactions and managed how I moved through a room. It felt like a portal to magic.
Unfortunately, the portal only opened one way. I could get in, but I couldn’t reliably get out on my own terms. One drink became three, five, whatever, and summoned a demon version of myself I didn’t recognize.
When I finally quit for good in February 2025, I worried sobriety would drain the color from my life. I pictured myself becoming vigorously sensible: hydrated, well-rested, and boring. Quelle horreur!
But that’s not what happened. It was challenging at first, sure. But now I feel more alive and much more content in my weirdness than I did when I was drinking.
I may go to bed considerably earlier, but I still encourage people to skip small talk, consult their spirit guides, and quit their day jobs. I’m still the parent starting impromptu dance parties in the frozen aisle of Whole Foods, to my kids’ mortification, until they inevitably cave and join in. Alcohol, I realized, had been taking credit for qualities that belonged to me all along.
Still, I missed some of the impulsivity that came with partying — the rush of doing something unnecessary simply because it felt good.
Tattoos have given me some of that back.
I love getting tattooed. I like walking into Frank’s sprawling studio, settling into the soft leather chair, and feeling the first scratch of the needle. It barely hurts, and when it does, it’s good pain: chosen and contained. There’s something lovely about being completely inside my own body.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ve simply replaced one high with another. Maybe I have. But this high doesn’t make me disappear or chip away at my self-worth. If anything, it leaves me more present. It’s the opposite of numbing; it feels like waking up. I’m learning to stay awake without the needle too — to notice what I actually want instead of just reacting to what everyone needs from me.
My tattoos make that awareness visible: the places I’ve been, the people and animals I’ve loved, the stranger and slightly witchier woman I’m welcoming. If I look like someone who has lived an interesting life, it’s because I have.
Next, I think, will be the outline of my dog Esmé’s head, including her one floppy ear that never quite matched the other. I’ll collect a few photographs, consider the placement, and run it by Ethan and the kids.
Then, when it feels right, I’ll DM Frank.
Rachel Van Dolsen is a New York–based writer and PR consultant. She spends her days crafting stories—for clients and for her two children, who demand increasingly elaborate bedtime sagas. She writes the newsletter Close Enough to Burn on Substack, where she explores motherhood, creativity, and the occasional ADHD-fueled side quest.
