Tattoos

This is (super-late) Essay #35 of The 52 Essay Challenge, a series in which I write a new (unpolished & messy) essay each week during 2017.

“It makes you look dirty. Like you need a good scrub brush in the bathtub.” This was what my parents said about tattoos. Dumi. Dirt.

When I was in my early teens, I played around with the idea of a tattoo. It looked cool. Rebellious. I don’t know if I actually wanted one at that time – I was just fascinated by how they looked on people and what that inked skin might mean for them. I also thought about the pain they must have withstood in order to get these tattoos. It must be really important to that person to want to go through pain willingly. And to know that the marking was permanent.

But then my parents words, repeated over and over, each time we came across someone who had a tattoo, started to stick in my brain:

Who gets tattoos? Dirty people. Trashy people. Low-class people. Why would you want to mess up what God gave you? Why would you defile the temple of your soul? He makes all things perfect. Why would you want to mark yourself like that? Brand yourself like cattle? Only good-for-nothings, drug dealers, drug addicts, and rough bikers get tattoos. Only losers get tattoos.

As a straight-A, perfectionist Asian girl, daughter of immigrants, I most certainly wasn’t any of those. Which meant I most certainly wasn’t going to get a tattoo. Ever.

So I continued the family tradition: to judge people as my parents did: tattoos are dirty and only dirty—sometimes scary, threatening-looking—people have them.

Still, my fascination persisted. Just below the radar, in the way back of my mind. What is it about marking your skin permanently? And to endure pain for it? How does this act demonstrate a kind of devotion or dedication to the thing that one chooses as a tattoo? How much thought goes into it? (There are, of course, those impulsive tattoos in which not much thought is given. What, also, does this say?)

I used to be shy about asking people the story of their tattoos. Heck, I was shy even trying to look at them! I would sneak glances, pretending to look at other things nearby. It never occurred to me that people who get tattoos want you to look at them. And if they didn’t want you to look? They would’ve picked a different location on the body. Somewhere hidden.

In Melissa Febos’s book, Abandon Me, she writes about her tattoos in the essay “All of Me” and how they serve as reminders of her scars, of past pains. New people started coming into my life who bore tattoos as a declaration: this is who I am and whom I love – don’t like it? Too bad. Then I started noticing that almost everyone around me had a tattoo. Was there a tattoo boom and I missed the memo?

These people were not dangerous or “dumi”. They were yogis, poets, suburban moms, academics, young professionals. The stories they told about their tattoos ranged from beautiful to funny. One friend has a tattoo that she got in her younger years— one of a moustache on her index finger, so she could put it under her nose for fun. I laughed when she told me, loving it so much because it spoke to her playful spirit.

The other night, another friend told me about his plans to get a tattoo. He’s not some twentysomething who’s trying to figure out his life; he’s a man in his fifties who has recently found yoga and wants to have a permanent reminder of how much yoga has changed his life, a way for him to stay on this path. I laughed when he told me because –yes, I too, have been thinking about getting a tattoo.

What's funny is that people are surprised to learn that I don't have any. We know what my assumptions were about people with tattoos. So for others to assume that I have a tattoo *somewhere* on my body -- what does this say about their opinion of tattoos and the kind of people who have them? And how do I fit into that opinion? (Not that I care, but instead, I'm curious.)

Know this about me: I am a visual person. I learn better visually. I can sight-read music like nobody’s business. I get mentally crowded when I am surrounded by clutter (which is most of the time –don’t get me started!—but imagine how much more amazing I could be if I wasn’t mentally crowded!) I need visual reminders. Handwritten to-do lists are my thing (things get lost in my head all of the time!).Vision boards rock my world. A tattoo? A visual reminder and a testament of devotion. For me, if I were to get one, that’s what it would be. A tattoo of what? Well, I have a few ideas…