One day my girlfriend wanted to get a tattoo. Naturally, I wanted to give her my input on the design.

Fellow tattoo enthusiasts, we all know the gold standard for boyfriend/girlfriend tattoos is a cursive, italicized name in heavy print. Something like “Jesse” around the breast or buttocks area. But I knew instantly this would not do. I felt my girlfriend and I needed something a bit stronger. We immediately set out to conjure up that image in an intense brainstorming session.

My first instinct was to get a portrait of myself giving Conan the Barbarian a very bad charley horse. This image sent out the proper vibe, in my mind, about where she and I were coming from. But ultimately it was too risky. Given a bit of time, the tattoo could come out looking like me giving a female body builder a thigh massage. Which would not be the proper vibe at all.

My second impulse was a sweet sleeve of circuits, culminating in a picture on her shoulder of me making a robot cry. “It’s about the technology,” I told her. She said she didn’t think her arm was the proper place for that kind of statement. “I couldn’t agree less,” I told her. But it didn’t matter, that one was a no go.

After all was said and done, we settled on her nickname, “Coconut Throat” on her left ankle. I said, “Why not just get a coconut on your throat?” But she felt that a coconut on her neck would look too much like an injury from far away. We aren’t together anymore.