Sawasdee khrap. This column comes to you straight from Thailand. I had some minor surgery yesterday and I’m loaded up with painkillers and antibiotics now, so don’t expect this to be very funny or to make a lot of sense but, to quote my editor, a deadline is a deadline. I do most of my medical stuff in Thailand. It’s not that I have anything against Hong Kong doctors – like any place else, HK has its share of really great doctor’s as well as a few bad ones. It’s just that when you visit a doctors office in HK, a large part of what you’re paying is going towards the sky high rent he or she is paying. In Thailand one can find western quality health care at Thai prices and with Thai attitudes and get to eat a lot of Thai food on the side, so it’s all good. I find that most Hong Kong doctors who do western-style medicine love to prescribe pills, lots of them, as often as possible. I once asked the Thai general practitioner I visit if I should try Prozac. He suggested that I try meditation instead.

Anyway, one thing I’ve noticed about the western men who spend a lot of time in Southeast Asia is that many of them seem to collect two things – silver jewellery and tattoos. The jewellery part is easy – that stuff is cheaper than chips here. As for tattoos, well, I can only speak for myself.

I got my first tattoo in 1999 at the fabled Ricky & Pinky in Wanchai. I was leaving Hong Kong and wasn’t sure if I’d ever be able to return. I thought that a tattoo would make a good, permanent souvenir of the years I’d spent here. So I had a couple of drinks, stepped inside nervously, selected a picture from a book – a Chinese dragon and a crescent moon - and the guy went to work.

While I was sitting there getting the tattoo, a group of people came in, 4 men and 1 woman. They sat down on the sofa, talked amongst themselves for a minute or two, and then the woman came over to me. “Excuse me, where are you from?” she sweetly enquired. “I’m from New York,” I told her. “Then why the fuck don’t you get your tattoo done in New York?” she screamed. “Um, er, ah, I live here?” “Oh.” She went back to the sofa; the five of them talked for a minute or two, then got up and left. They gave me some nasty looks but it would seem they had decided not to kill me for the crime of making them wait.

Eventually my tattoo was finished. Was it painful? Not too bad, except at the end, when without warning he grabbed a spray bottle of alcohol and gave my arm a schpritz. I screamed and almost fell out of the chair. I showed the tattoo to my (now ex-) wife who sweetly asked, “Honey, why is the dragon holding a banana?”

It’s said that tattoos are addictive and I can definitely testify to that. I’ve got four now and am about to start on my fifth. Even though my first one wasn’t great, I loved having it and loved showing it to people. I even loved that my mother cried when she saw it; her first response being that now I could never be buried in a Jewish cemetery.

I didn’t start thinking about the next one till several years later when I was in Bangkok. I walked by a tattoo shop and saw some very nice photos in their window. The name of the shop was Jimmy Wong Tattoo. I went inside but Jimmy was not there. Instead I met a crazy French guy named Andre who was traveling the world, stopping in various cities for a few months at a time, hooking up with some local tattoo parlor and earning enough money from his craft to then move on to the next place. I talked with him for awhile and the next night he showed me a drawing he’d done for me, combining the yin yang symbol with a dragon (What can I say? I like dragons.)

It was a nice design and he did an okay job, but true to his nature he split town before it was finished. By that point I’d met Jimmy and he finished it up, fixing and improving upon the original design.

Over the years, Jimmy has come to be a good friend of mine. He’s been doing tattoos since the Vietnam war and is world-famous in tattoo circles. If you Google him, you’ll find his most famous client was former New York Doll guitarist Johnny Thunders – Johnny stopped off in Bangkok, got a tattoo from Jimmy, flew back to New York and died the next day. I know, probably not the best advertisement and I don’t see the sense of getting a permanent tattoo and dying a day later; surely henna would have been permanent enough in that case.

Jimmy’s tiny shop is like a clubhouse for his former clients and tattoo aficionados from around the world. He has a fixed lifestyle that is admirable – he shows up for work around 11pm, does what he loves for three or four hours and then spends the rest of the night in various illegal late night bars drinking with friends. And he travels the world, a headline star at tattoo conventions. Three of his five kids have gone into the family business and have their own shops around town.

A couple of years after we met, I got Jimmy to take me to Wat Bang Phra, a Buddhist temple 30km south of Bangkok famous for its tattooing monks. He handled translations for me and I got a tattoo done by a famous Buddhist monk. I wanted something done in this style because I felt it would connect me to a more ancient tradition, as well as visibly show my respect for Thai culture. The guy used a two foot long steel rod with two needle-sharp points, dipped into ink, smashed into my arm repeatedly. The monk joked that his technique was so good that I would not feel a thing, and certainly that seemed to be the case for the half dozen monks who got tattoos done as I watched. But when it was my turn, the pictures Jimmy took show that after about three minutes I was practically howling in pain, my eyes imploring the camera to make the monk stop. Fortunately he finished about three minutes later and I then received blessings from him and the temple’s head monk.

I was so proud of the finished work that I went back for another one a year later. The first one was supposed to give me luck with women. The second time I asked for luck with money and was given a no-extra-charge bonus – now I cannot be shot or stabbed. My wallet hasn’t magically filled with money overnight and I haven’t won Mark Six, but I’m pretty certain that since getting that tattoo no one has shot or stabbed me so I think it must be working. And given my habit of saying what I think in the workplace and sometimes straying from the politically correct in my writings, I need all the help I can get.