Meaning in the Mundane {61}: Ink

I got my first tattoo when I got kicked out of college, part one. I had been floundering for awhile. First came the terrible realization that it didn’t actually matter how hard I worked to learn something and learn it well. What mattered was my ability to write the right paper — that is, the one that played to the professor’s whim. And then, heartbreak, of the psychotic variety. I was “asked not to come back”, and in that horrible haze of a life upturned, I found a job and a crappy apartment…and began drawing, obsessively, a tree — twisted branches reaching toward a cold, distant full moon.

I went to the tattoo shop, several sketches in hand, and gave them to the beautiful, unnaturally tall tattoo artist. She’d come into my shop several times and we were, in a way, friends. She loved the sketch but wondered aloud, “Are you sure about this moon?” I asked what she meant, and she smiled, a gentle, knowing smile, and simply asked, “Do you trust me?”

At this point, there was nothing I knew for certain, so I said that I did. I left, several hours later with my tree — captured perfectly from my drawing — and behind it, not the small, cold moon I had drawn over and over in my cramped, furniture-less living room. No. Instead, she had etched a massive pomegranate moon, crimson, cratered, and looming. About half way through she said to me, “You’ve been wandering for a time in a dark place. You know the edge of the forest is near, but you haven’t quite found it. But one day, the trees will part and the light of the moon will reach you and you will know that place. You already do — you’ve been drawing it for weeks. It might look scary to some, but to you it will be home.”

My second tattoo came after yet another breakup, one that followed the first in a similar and equally heartbreaking manner — although it wasn’t the same love as the previous, it came out of nowhere and was cruel. Again, I walked up to the same beautiful woman and she said, “What do you want?” I told her to just draw on me. Anything. Something beautiful. She knew that I’d admired a drawing of a gem stone, designed to be placed on the lower back. Instead, she placed it on my sternum, changing it from its original blues and purples to a shining rainbow gem, sprouting vines with curling leaves and tendrils. She had a gentle, almost beatific smile as she worked. When I sat up and looked in the mirror, she said simply, “It’s you. Never forget.” And I blinked, tearful, that anyone could think so highly of me.

She moved away, my artist friend, and some years later I found out she’d died — violently, tragically. I swore off tattoos, then. It seemed right — the two I had were more than just artwork. She had seen into my soul and transmuted my spirit into art — reminders of my survival and my destiny. No one else could possibly do that.

I caved, eventually. Because I love tattoos, yes, but also because she was all about self-creation in every way. Reinvent yourself in every sense, she would say. Become who you are, not who you’re supposed to be. Six feet tall, black and blue dreads to her knees, transdermal spikes highlighting her visible aura — she was unabashedly herself. Always. Being the same is the most honorable thing I can do in her memory.

I sport an owl, now, on my left arm. The design was, again, a collaboration between myself and another artist, but I knew, now, what I wanted.

People look down on tattoos. They insist that you’ll regret these markers of moments one day, and chuckle to themselves that you are short-sighted, impulsive, childish. I say, we all have scars, some given, some self-inflicted, and some invisible. These are the ones I take the most strength from, the ones that remind me I have lived, loved, lost, grown, and continue to learn. Their meanings change, over time, and I marvel at the sadness transformed into strength, the confusion turned beautiful.

Shout out to Molly S Hill for the topic inkspiration.