My first tattoo was on my leg, the body part I am most proud of. My second tattoo was on the back of my arm, smaller and lighter as maybe I wasn’t ready to commit. And my third tattoo was on my back. The reason I get tattoos is to remember the time which has passed, not a singular symbol which stands for a meaning, but an image of the person I was and the chunk of time surrounding the getting. The symbol itself is irrelevant. I’ll start with the bird (leg). The bird, who is a roadrunner, was not intentional. I was on a road trip with my friend, C, and she had made herself an appointment with a woman to get a tattoo in Marfa when we were passing through. As the date approached, she realized she did not want to get one and so on a whim, I picked an image off of a flash sheet and got the simple stick and poke above the back of my knee on my hamstring. It is small, about the size of a silver dollar. Perhaps not because of, but at least in part, I will now always remember this road trip from California to Texas. It was 2021, the same year the state got its first big grid-failing freeze. With each poke, I felt those memories solidify, that I would not forget the potatoes cooked with Szechuan spices over the campfire, the woman who ran the shop in Alpine, so easily dismissed on the surface, but full of stories when you lingered a second longer, and cheersing with birthday tequila after hiking up to see the sunset above Arcosanti.
My brain and memory are not what they used to be, if they ever were. Sometimes I can’t recall whole weeks from countries I visited. I know I stayed on a cherry farm in Belgium, but what did the house look like? What were the names of the family who hosted me? My brain is a sieve on survival mode and it has been for some time. Culling out what it deems superfluous, I’m left with only the necessities which often exclude the warm glow and special moments which got me there. I am determined to take back what I can remember.
When I left LA after 8 years, I was devastated. How could one be so attached and still choose to leave? And yet when the feeling strikes, you have to act. At that point in time, my good friends had recently had a baby. Our other friend, P, and I were swapping going to their house regularly and baby sitting while the mom and dad were working as she and I had more flexible schedules than they did. When baby sitting time was over, we would collectively make dinner and eat long meals full of beautifully roasted dishes at their old wooden dining table. Those are some of my most precious memories and on the last dinner, two days before leaving and after a couple of beers I proposed, “What if we all got Ocean (the baby) tattoos?” I had been in the habit of bringing my sketchbook to the house and drawing the little dumpling while watching over him. That evening I messaged an artist on instagram with one of the drawings and the next day we were in the studio, the day before my scheduled departure.
We got the tattoos and I hurried back to my apartment to finish packing and meet my landlord, who would give me back my full deposit. That apartment held so many dinner parties, so many mezcal tastings, a terrible relationship, an angry puppy who I loved and fed deer sausage, French girls I met on a cycling trip, neighbors who I looked forward to running into, and very drunk times with friends before stumbling to Dodger’s Stadium next door. With my arm wrapped in plastic to cover and protect the fresh design and sweating too much from cleaning, I called my friend while tearing up, unable to box the few remaining knick knacks. Within the hour he joined and in a completely empty apartment we had wine into the night, so much so that I awoke the next morning on an air mattress I had pulled from my packed belongings to spend just one more night. The next day with a hazy, hungover mind and arm slightly throbbing, I was thankful for that last night of karaoke without music, rolling on empty wooden floors with half bottles of wine and makeshift cups. Even though it happens to be the form of a baby, who I also happen to know and love, that rests upon my arm, that baby is also Bacchus and will always speak to the freely flowing wine of that night and the three months of travel which followed before arriving at the next stop, Berlin.
Berlin is unique in that it is reverse accepting. While describing a popular club, I told my friend that if you are too conventionally attractive or under the age of 30, you have no hope of getting in. People in these clubs wear very little clothing in a desexualized context to be able to move more freely and better express themselves without the added layer of, “how can I strategically hide and/or emphasize parts of my body so that someone thinks I’m attractive and will notice me?” In these techno clubs, if you approach someone who does not want to be approached, you will be asked to leave and banned from coming back. It is an environment of complete acceptance of body and person that removes the objectification found in clubs the rest of the world over. In these spaces, our bodies are not ogled or judged or touched at all, they are for people of all shapes to move freely to music. It was in this context that I got my back tattoo.
We all have body issues, the ones that will not go away, weird ones that we can’t get over even when we are 100 percent sure that people are not looking. When Haruki Murakami, the author, was around the age of 20, he stripped down in front of a mirror and listed out all of the things he hates about himself. The list was long. He took a look at the list one more time and vowed to never care about those things again, put his clothes back on, and continued on with his life a little less self conscious than before. For me this was getting my back tattoo. I absolutely hate my back and everyone with a nice back feels like a microaggression directed exclusively at me. When I was a teenager, I recall reading an US Weekly which said Johnny Depp met Vanessa Paradis because he had never been so attracted to someone’s back before and I took that as a direct affront. My back has rolls no matter my size and clumps up at the sides around my armpit. The doughy texture makes weird noises when I do yoga exercises in a sports bra. My back had a vendetta against me and I, it.
Walking into the local tattoo studio, I was overwhelmed by the concentration of people so obviously cooler than me, an incredibly lame things to admit, but there was no way around it. The empowerment I felt in those clubs washed away as a large group of attractive people, those tattooing as well as the patrons, all turned to look towards the door and see who had stumbled in. My friend was getting a white tattoo and I was there to accompany her. Sitting in the front gallery surrounded by such casual hotness, I was approached by a woman who offered me water, probably sensing my discomfort. We got to chatting and she was amazingly friendly and, surprisingly, with very few tattoos herself. She explained that she was the owner of the studio and opened it because she has an appreciation of the art and enjoys meeting the types of people who are open to it. With that and the memory of all the people who I met in this weird, chrysalis phase of my life, I made an appointment for two weeks time, once again just days before leaving the city after a jam-packed six month stay.
Prior to the appointment, I had sent the artist the drawing I was considering and we worked together to simplify the linework and decide on a body location, finally settling on a wraparound design just below the bird. My thinking was that people are always commenting on the road runner, so if I get more tattoos, I should get them in places I don’t mind being looked at. At the meeting, however, the artist expressed concern that my leg wasn’t the right fit for the design as it would get distorted with movement, which was true. Though the drawing is of my dear friends, Natalie and Nora, I wasn’t emotionally attached to the image itself, I more wanted to distill the memory of Berlin and so I opened up his book of flash for one that better fit alongside the roadrunner. He could see that I was hesitant to pick a new design on the spot and offered to change the date, but since I was leaving, I wanted to get it then and there. Without knowing my specific baggage, he casually suggested my back.
Symbolically, they say that the back is a person’s foundation. The back is our history that we don’t have to face. We carry our packs with all of our belongings on our backs that hunch with age as we transform from the weight of living. My broad back, with all of it’s lumps, had a lot of canvas to work with. I removed my shirt and in a room full of people, we collectively found a place of pride for this drawing of my friends. The placement connects to Ocean and is the perfect spot for me to admire it with a coy turn of chin to shoulder. I love this tattoo and wearing shirts which expose it. Thusly, I love my back and exposing it, too. After an entire lifetime in baggy clothing and 3/4 sleeves, and over the course of an hour, I managed to feel completely differently about a part of me that’s always been there. Sometimes my back is still difficult for me to confront, the endless rolls on rolls, but now instead of focusing on the bits that hurt, I look at the memory of my friends visiting me, drinking pints at the beer garden, each of us with sketchbooks in hand and speaking excitedly about what the future holds.
Recording memories, realizations, and breakthroughs on the body may be working now, but I find myself wanting to hold it all just as closely as the times I’ve recorded so far. If I continue at this rate, my body will be covered in no time and when that is full and I still want more, how will I hold it all? After my most recent addition was completed in Taiwan, the motherland - three little people, throwaway sketches from a discarded notebook also arranged on my back, I felt satisfied. My life is full to the brim with ebbs and flows, seemingly bottomless lows and extraordinary highs. They come in the form of societal normalcy, a blue collar job at a desk and a space of my own, to out of the ordinary, living on a bicycle with a single outfit for weeks at a time. Just as my life moves up and down, I imagine the markings on my body will follow. My skin will sag with age, and Ocean, who rests politely on my triceps might drop to my elbow. The friends on my back will wrinkle and the little people who follow will fall into the folds. The bird will not be running, but sitting instead. This ebb of my life happens to be very tattoo heavy, perhaps the next will also be, or not. In any case, I don’t see myself regretting remembering the person who made this person the next person they will be.