Check out my Gary!

When i was 18 on summer holiday from uni i spent a summer working in a supermarket on the checkout. It was so mind numbingly boring that i changed my name by deed poll so i had a second middle name, simply to make things a little more interesting. I was born Joseph Douglas Orton, but since summer '04 i have been Joseph Douglas Wulf Orton (Wulf being the name of my favourite medieval chronicler, i only later found it was Hitler's middle name, i'm not a nazi!!).

This weekend i went to Bestival on the Isle of Wight with some friends. In the program listed alongside 'attractions' it had a tattoo parlour advertised, so my friends and i agreed to go along to mark the weekend. Unfortunately on arrival, much to my bear like annoyance, it turned out to be a temporary tattoo parlour. This didn't sit comfortably with me so on the drive home early monday morning i decided to go to my local tattoo parlour in the afternoon to get the "nevermore" tattoo i had been thinking about for some time on my chest. At this point my friend chimed in and said "yeah, and you should get 'Gary' tattooed on your arse too". Suddenly the fog that was littering my brain after 3 days of festival life was lifted, this was literally the best idea i had ever heard, after all we had been calling each other Gary all weekend, despite not camping with anyone called Gary. Maybe it was the fact i hadn't slept properly for 4 nights, maybe it was the small white wine spritzer i had drunk the night before, or maybe it all comes down to me finding things like this hilarious. Whatever the reason i didn't care, that afternoon after arriving home i showered, put on some clean clothes and headed over the road to my local tattooist, dropped my trousers and had a random mans name permanently tattooed on my right buttock...
People have asked me why i did it, the only answer i can come up with now is that, when i'm old, i don't want to be one of those people who looks back and thinks "i really wish i had tattooed the name Gary on my arse when i was younger".