About two years ago, I became obsessed with the fact that I was from Chicago. Not Chicago-proper, I’m a kid from the suburbs like most others, but my parents raised me to understand the city. I’ve known my way around the downtown area for as long as I can remember and I’ve been receiving speeches about gentrification of my parents’ old neighborhoods for even longer. Since beginning skating about 10 years ago, I’d take the train into the city to skate all over every weekend. This was well before I was 16. While I was still in those primitive, formative stages. When everything anyone suggested was a good idea. Hair dye. Breaking laws. Meeting strangers. Learning by failing. I was running, heart beating, fingertips spurting crimson, alive.

Once I got into tattoos a few years back, it seemed natural that I’d get a Chicago skyline. Or a Chicago flag. Maybe a combination of the two:

Stretching from the lower left part of my stomach around my side, and to the lower left part of my back, I wanted the skyline of Chicago as viewed from Lake Michigan. I wanted the lake to be the sort of blue that looks like a cross between blue, purple, and nothingness. Then the skyline in the thinnest black line possible. I wanted the buildings filled in with the pattern of Chicago’s flag, light blue and white striped with red stars, as if the skyline had been cut out from it. I wanted the Sears tower to run parallel with my forearm, so that when I hung my arms at my side, the tendons in my veins would mirror a pinnacle of human achievement. I wanted the Northern side of the city wrapping around my backside, the rich areas stabbing into my bloodstream from the behind. I wanted the Southern side stretched across my abs, the side of the tracks that my father worked his way out of, muscling every inch of the way.

I had the money saved. Then I got into another school. Realized that I’d be moving to New York. It was quite possibly the only other city in America that convinced people to have its outline permanently engraved into their bodies.

So the plan was off. Postponed at least. I’d be living in New York City soon, and couldn’t afford to go throwing money around like that. I went. I lived. It’s expensive here. Tattoos were off for a while.

It’s ten months later and now I have the money again. I’ve fallen in love with this city. Now I’m revising the plan for future ink. It’s not so much the fact that I live in a city foreign to the rest of my family that’s keeping me from simply revising the design. I love living in Brooklyn. I’ve given a lot of thought to something a lot like the Chicago tattoo. The viewpoint of Manhattan from the Williamsburg bridge that I ride my bike over every day. The skyline painted between the brick arches of the Brooklyn bridge. Even the outlines of the five boroughs, if properly placed, would be an impressing sight every morning for my remaining years.

But none of that feels completely right. It’s not any of the bridges, the skyline, the view, the success of living in a place where I know nothing. The Chicago tattoo felt right because, in those times, I never saw myself permanently moving anywhere else. I’d talk about it, sure, but it was never a reality. I’m much more malleable now. I was always running within Chicago. Now I’m running all over the country. Maybe the world would be a better picture of permanence.

There’s a weird ticking sensation you get when you’re being tattooed. It’s not completely painful, though you know it must be hurting. I won’t go and tell you that it’s more akin to pleasure, though there is some sort of release in the vibration of those machines. More than any of that, it’s awakening. You become alert, alive, aware of what is going on while you’re under the needle. Whatever is being drawn, it results in a feeling of permanence. The ink flows and runs through the needle tip and is forcefully shoved under your epidermis. It’s a scar that results in an art. Even joke tattoos that might be of our favorite Star Wars characters carry with them an element of seriousness, almost of piety (who doesn’t love Yoda?). We wish for even the comical to remain with us forever, even if we have to force the running ink to stop dead in our own coagulation.

I think that’s why I won’t ever get a skyline of any sort drawn on me. There is no longer any permanence. I can up and move. I can flow. I can adapt. I knew Chicago well. Now I have no clue about it. I know New York all right, but I could learn London just as easily. None of these places have any meaning in the way that home once did.

I’d like to be the ink. I feel as if I’m in the needle now. I do not belong below it. I’m more adept at flowing, at marking, at running than standing in place. I think of getting tattoos of cities or exact locales, of reality-based identifying factors now and my hands shake. My fingers glisten with the urge to open a map and run to anywhere other than lying prone on a table, white-knuckled, waiting for someone to be finish marking me for identification.