When I was very small, I used to love to look at my father's tattoos. They were the grubby blue of a bic pen, a record of time spent in a California jailhouse for crimes never specified. Dad himself had been drunk, and the very large man who insisted upon tattooing him had also been very drunk, and so a number of the tattoos were illegible hieroglyphs. There was a recognizable heart, though, and something that even very young I recognized as either an ankh or a blurred cross. Something about having a visible reminder that my father pre-existed me, that he'd lived through something and it was marked on his flesh, was fascinating for me. It was like one of his elaborate (questionably true) stories of childhood or adolescence, only illustrated.
A few years later, when I entered school, I realized none of my friends' fathers had tattoos of any kind. None of my uncles did either. No other men in my life had ink on their skin. Briefly I wondered what that meant about my family, our place in the world (already precarious enough--by seven I had a hair-trigger understanding of class and felt my own alienation pretty starkly). For a very brief time, I was ashamed of the blurry ink that showed something about us that no one would talk about.
At ten, I encountered a book called
Amy's Eyes, and in the first few pages of the story, a struggling tailor deposits his infant daughter at an orphanage so that he might go to sea to earn some money. With her he leaves a doll, the Captain, a sharp-dressed naval captain stitched from bits of cloth. Before Amy's father leaves her, he realizes some part of the Captain seems unfinished:
"One night he had come home after an evening at a public house, singing, drinking, and talking with friends, and it had all of a sudden come upon him that the Captain, then unfinished and with no clothing yet, could use a tattoo. It is an old urge among sailors to want a tattoo, and there is probably more to it than the vanity of being decorated. A tattoo is a token of memory and identity, and it is some small comfort after four months at sea, perhaps, to glance at the name of a loved on bordered around with flowers, or in time of trial to remember the tattooed motto 'Death Before Dishonor,' or when the ship is sinking to think on a graceful script that spells out 'Mother,' or to contemplate, in bitter moments, the picture of a heart thrust through with a dagger. So Amy's father gave the Captain a tattoo on his right forearm...It pictured a needle and thread, and touched in red and blue ink gave indelible notice that this was not a mere sailor before the mast, but a doll to take command high upon the poop deck, a doll of some significance."
The next day I announced to my relatively unsurprised parents that I was going to get lots of tattoos when I grew up. My father tried to tell me little girls didn't get tattoos and I informed him that I wouldn't be a
little girl with tattoos, I was going to be a
woman with tattoos. And also, I informed him, "Mr. Prison Tatts shouldn't cast any stones."
The tramp stamp on my back was a thing I got after my first round of depressions left me with a bipolar diagnosis. Part of my just liked the celestial motif, and it was simple as that. The symbolism I imparted to it, though, was that the sun contained all the other heavenly creatures within. That all the different phases of the sky were there, encompassed in one symbol. All the different moods. It was a way for me to accept all these shifting selves and sensations.
These days of course I'm a bit more stable. But the tattoo is a reminder of all mutability and all consistency as well: day becomes night, the phases of the moon change, summer edges on into winter, it's always moving but through the same motions. And of course I can't just look down and see it (it's on my back), but I like knowing it's back there, and I like catching glimpses of it when I change or when I get out of the shower. It's enough.
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