Or it can be a prison. Hear me out.
So, in case you hadn’t heard, I just got my second tattoo.
Like, just got. Still bloody and black. “Good luck on the bus,” one of the artists said.
I hadn’t decided which of my series would be my next tattoo, but I knew I wanted to get one in France. Then, among England, Scotland and France, I had been inundated with images of lions, everywhere.
Conveniently, one of my more completed designs, not to cumbersome to tolerate the healing process in my short stay, was my lion concept. (I know I wrote about doing my elephant one with the Jewish verse next, but it’s too giant and inconvenient here). Lions symbolize God in Christian symbology, C.S. Lewis uses it as his God character Azlan in The Chronicles of Narnia, but lions are also a great symbol for power. My original lion design had a male lion, but lionesses specifically, as they are the “breadwinners” so to speak of their species, I thought would be more relevant to me and the rest of the symbology.
So I tweaked it. A lot.
The most notable change being I changed the lion to a lioness. More specifically, the lioness warrior goddess and also goddess of healing; Sekhmet, which I also found in England and France at different Egyptian exhibits.
So I had an image that tied to my travels, and my fascinations, which I was hoping for. That said, there is a more personal connection with the related chakra for this tattoo and that’s the prison I’d like to talk about.
This tattoo is for my svadisthana or my sacral chakra. This is convenient given the problems I’ve been having with my body lately, and with changing my original design from a lion to a goddess lioness of both war and healing, I hope to imply an intent to heal these particular maladies.
And you know, I had a whole other set of anecdotes I was going to use to describe how my body can feel like a prison, but given a series of recent events, I have changed my mind.
I was going to talk about loving your body, and ways I have learned to strive for that, but I honestly can’t do that right now, so we’re going to talk about not loving your body.
I have what’s called dermatillomania. It’s not actually that uncommon, about 5% of the US has it last time I checked, but most people don’t give it a name or seek out where it comes from. Typically, it’s associated with OCD, a physical ailment of a mental issue. I could conceivably have this, but I also believe it’s a tick, product of of years of emotional suppression.
People can have various focuses for their tick, mine is normally my cuticles, but can extend to my face and legs if I get fixated on a zit or an ingrown hair. It comes in waves. Sometimes I have almost completely healed hands. Other times I can have bloody open wounds on every finger.
My hands can get torn up without me even noticing. I don’t even have to look. I can get obsessed with a pimple in the mirror and attack it for 10 minutes, burring a hole into my face. I can spend anything from 5 minutes to an hour scouring my legs for ingrown hairs and literally digging them out.
Most of the time, it’s relatively painless, and doesn’t hurt anyone else, so it gets filed way in the back of my issues to work on. But let’s be honest here: I am self-mutilating. This shouldn’t be surprising. At a young age, I learned to turn aggression inwards to avoid hurting other people (This is before I learned words can hurt just as much). I will easily ignore injuries or illness until it’s hindering enough for someone else to say something. I will work myself until I’m bag of pulverized meat. I will go days without eating because it takes that long for the pangs of hunger to be noticeable. This results in a high pain tolerance which, given the 3.5 hour tattoo work on my rib cage, turned out to be pretty convenient. But in other cases, this can be extremely dangerous.
Yesterday I went to shave my legs, prepping for tattoo time, and I realized, although I had forgotten, sometime the day before, I had spent a good half hour picking at both my legs. Shaving over them was extremely difficult for two reasons: The first, because it hurt like hell. I had open wounds all over the place, it looked like chicken pox. The second, was because I wanted to do it again…
The overwhelming urge I have, to tear gaping holes into my body, to make myself so viscerally repulsive that anyone that looked at me would almost involuntarily look away from disgust, that the only people who would acknowledge my presence would be void of any sexual interest, if only out of pity, is a very seductive idea at the moment.
In the last week, the amount of crazy men I have had to stave off, the over-the-top nice and inquisitive bus driver’s, the looks I get from mother’s when I drop off or pick Thomas up from school, being told “you’re still hot” as comfort when I’m sick, the objectification, the importance of sex over any quality of a relationship… I’m losing my flipping mind.
I couldn’t even make it a block away from the tattoo parlor, after it was over, before someone started shouting at me from a nearby parking lot. “Beautiful. Magnificent!”
“Stop talking.”
“Why do you hurt me?” he said.
“Why do you hurt me?” I repeated.
This is all the while, happening while I have been bleeding from my vagina for about two months. My mystery malady. This happened for a month before I went abroad. I was tested for everything, twice. No one could explain it. Then I started birth control for the first time, and now I can’t stop bleeding. I can’t tell if it’s the mystery malady or the slow reduction of my period due to hormones. But basically I’m a bleeding, hormonal mess and I want to throw bloodied tampons at half the people I come into contact with. I want to thrash my face, rip out my hair, scream bloody murder and bury myself.
This reaction, I realize is extremely irrational. And I know every other woman on the planet and every marginalized group feels this exactly the same way, and has the strength to get the hell over it most days. But right now is not one of those days. I want to tear myself apart. So we’re going to acknowledge it, confront it, and deal with it, because I’m sure many of you can empathize on your bad days and the rest of you can learn, and frankly, so can I.
Now, this is interesting because it’s urges like this, burring holes into my skin that were the only fears I had about getting my first tattoo. I was warned, for the first time a little too close to my tattoo date for comfort, that the healing process was sometimes more painful than the tattoo itself because it’s scabbing, itching, and peeling for the next week or so. And if you give in to the urge to scratch it, it hurts like hell, and you can ruin your tattoo. I was terrified of potentially digging my art right out of my skin.
Yet that didn’t happen. The commitment, the obligation I had to my art, the meaning imbedded in it, was more powerful than my urge to pick my skin apart.
So today I got my second tattoo. Not just because I need something else to focus on so I’m not ripping up my face, though the timing couldn’t be better, but also because this is my sacral chakra. This is all about owning and healing the sexual and pleasure side of me.
I still have a lot of sexual trauma to work through, theoretically the mental reason why I have mystery malady, I need to realize that I can’t escape my body. It is mine and I will have to suffer how people respond to it until the day I die, and by God I’m going to love it despite all of them, and it really is hard to allow pleasure into your body when you don’t like your body.
My body is a prison, but it’s also just a vessel.
At the end of the day, all I have this body for is to move me from point A to point B, to be positioned to cause and marvel at miracles, to create and admire beauty. So if my body can do that, then we are golden. My body is slowly deteriorating no matter what, so the sooner I love it now, the more able I will be to love it in every state after now.
The mantra, more commonly known as the Serenity Prayer, but it manifests in different cultures as well, goes:
“Give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the one from the other.”
I can’t change a lot about me. And I certainly can’t change how people respond to me or my body. Those are out of my control.
For me, there are some things that are in my control. I can choose to love my body, I can choose what people I allow close to my body and I can choose to own the crap out of how I adorn my body. Like with tattoos.
Now that we’ve muscled through that, let’s discuss the tattoo. The placement of this one bares just as much meaning as the design, and certainly just as much as my last tattoo. This is my second piece of spiritual armor, meant to be my belt of truth. This also represents my sacral chakra which makes relevant the placement close to my pelvis. Though there is also a little nod to the book of Revelations which is often cited in talks about whether Christians can have tattoos; the point being that there is an angel described among other attributes, with a mouth full of sword and;
“On His robe and on His thigh He has a name written, ‘KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.’” (Revelations 19:16).
So a little sarcastic Christian barb, if you will.
I originally was going to have that as my verse, but it’s rather irrelevant given my view of god, and doesn’t portray the “truth” of the belt I intend, especially laced with sarcasm.
I think that getting my sacral chakra tattoo next is fitting given my issues with sexuality I’ve had in the last year, and my mystery malady. I also, in my time abroad and alone, have had an opportunity to assess myself in many ways, including how I deal with myself on a sexual and romantic level, and had a nice epiphany about where my needs stem from, so this is also a praise to that revelation.
Let’s get on with discussing the image.
The Compass Rose Lioness
A. The Palm Fronds are a double entendre. There is the Judeo-Christian reference, as it is one of the leaves for rejoicing in Jewish tradition, and was used when Jesus entered Jerusalem as both victory and peaceful revolution. I also wanted it to be a lion’s mane, but considering I’ve got a lioness here, it is also a nod to females in power. Like female Pharaohs wore false beards (actually men did too), this lioness wears a false mane, to further enunciate her dominion, and to take importance off of gender expression.
B1. The Cow that you see on the top capital, is to signify Surat Al-Baquarh, the second chapter of the Qu’ran, which is where this chakra’s verse comes from. The cow also references the direction this compass is facing, the top being the East, and the image is taken from the book of the Celestial Cow from Ancient Egyptian mythology.
B2. The Cartouche, Egyptian glyph indicating a royal name or title on the bottom capital, contains the verse of Surat Al-Baquarh that I am using which is 115, (which, I realize in Arabic looks like 110). The verse reads, in one translation;
“Allah belongs to the east and the west, so wherever you turn, there is the face of Allah, all Encompassing and Knowing.”
C. The Pillar Capitals that frame this tattoo form the points of this compass. I will discuss the reason for the compass later. They each contain images that suggest their directions:
East, symbolized by the cow, and the position of the sun disc, (East being the direction of the rising sun). South, symbolized by the lotus plants prominent in Upper Egypt, the South. West, symbolized by a part of the glyph for the west, a hawk or ostrich feather, I chose feathers for the capital. North, symbolized by the Nile, of the three zigzags, as is the glyph for water, specifically of the Nile.
D. The Lioness with the sun disc and uraeus is the Egyptian goddess Sehkmet, as I have already explained. She is a war goddess but later also associated with healing. I have a lot of sexual healing to do, and I also think of myself as a cat in many respects.
I suddenly decided on a sun disc for my lioness because I thought the sun, specifically the sun rising, in the east, represented that this is not an image of success. This is not the commemoration of a moment of completion. I have a lot of work to do, the sun has only just risen.
E. The Compass Rose is, I think, the most important element of this whole design. So the verse from the Qu’ran I take to be honestly very pantheistic. That God is everywhere, in every religion, can be found in every soul. This, I believe to be the greatest truth (belt of truth) of God, or Allah. That it is inescapable. No matter where you turn, no matter what direction you go, or what hole you dug yourself into, you can find God there. And this is my symbolic compass of always being able to find God, to find Oneness, to find beauty, to find truth. God is very much truth for me, and I am 100% committed to getting that engraved in my skin.
I hope now, when I look at my legs, I will remember that they are more a vehicle to find truth. And that I will love them, and my whole body, for the simple gift of getting me this far to experience all that I have. That I have the ability to turn east and west, the ability to walk, and to love in order to find God in all of those moments after this.
2016 Tattoo: Read here.
