Ink Me Up (pt 1 of a series on tattoos)

Awhile ago, Andrea Scarpino started this facebook thread about the importance of tattoos. Her status update was Andrea Scarpino "is interested in knowing why you got a tattoo --what does your tattoo mean to you?" Knowing the woman who asked it, this is not an idle question. Andrea and I went to grad school together. Her main focus was poetry, but she also pursued creative nonfiction, women's studies, disability studies... you know, in her free time. So I wrote a lengthy --I had worried at the time, *too* lengthy --and personal reply. Andrea and I haven't been in touch too much since grad school and I thought simultaneously a) this is too forward, to take up so much room on her thread and b) maybe this is a way we can reconnect. I held my breath for a few days until she wrote back... and it was very encouraging. She said some kind things about my writing that sort of surprised me (it always surprises me when people say kind things -- it's not false modesty; I'm horribly awkward at receiving compliments) and motivated me to write more on the subject on my own blog.

To say I've always wanted a tattoo would be exaggerating, but I've always thought that well-done tattoos are beautiful manifestations of art. Since I was in my late teens I coveted other people's ink. I waited to get my own, though, for quite some years after that. And it was good that I waited. The images and symbols that I craved during my adolescence were not personal to me. It was sort of like looking at a designer dress on a mannequin and admiring the color, the line, the beading...and still thinking it would look that way on me.

I got my first tattoo when I was 30 or perhaps 31... it was in late autumn, close to my birthday when I went for it. That year (2005) I had graduated from OSU with an MFA in poetry, and moved back to Pittsburgh about a month after graduating. I don't think I allowed myself to process the fact that I felt suddenly dislocated from my writing / academic / disability community... I had no idea what I was feeling or what the right way to live my life was. What I mean is, I sort of put Columbus in a box, taped the lid down, and pushed it to the way back of the closet. I stopped using my white cane, even though it meant more running into people, falling, nearly getting hit by cars, walking into plate glass, etc. I was a new me trying to stick myself back into a life that felt someone reverted-to-pre-Columbus. Many of my friends were moving on too, but then were moving on to PhD programs or teaching jobs. They had mentors that were guiding them through the process, mentors who acted as stepping stones until they got to the next safe place to alight. 

My mentor, David, had MS. Throughout my time in grad school, I could see that he was slowly getting more symptomatic. But he was still good. There. Believed in me. Pushed me. He appeared, and I mean this in a relative sense, *well*. In retrospect, I think how he must have worked so hard to do this. 

About a month after I left Columbus, I heard that he'd gotten leukemia. I sent him a drawing, a mandala for health... After working so long and hard on words together, I didn't have the right words for him. Everything I wanted to say either felt contrite or was inappropriately complex.

News arrived sporadically over mass emails. He'd been admitted the cancer hospital and was being treated. He was going to be released because he'd achieved remission. And then, double-shock, right after his release... he passed away. The obituary said it was from complications of MS. I went back for the funeral and just... had absolutely no idea what to say, once again. The celebration of his life was held in a packed theatre. Shame on me: I allowed myself to be lost in the crowd. I don't think I even approached his widow. What the hell could I say? I'm not a great talker in the first place. I didn't know his family or anything. Everyone, everyone loved him, and rightfully so. He'd had a whole life outside of school... wife, children, grandchildren, a billion other students and ex-students and colleagues and... yeah. 

When MFAs were getting ready to graduate, many of us made our mentors going-away presents for all their help. I think Carrie knitted a scarf. I don't know if this was tradition or what the whole present thing. But I'd wanted to do something for David. As June approached, I hit on the idea. I sort of "do art" as a hobby. Mixed media, collage, altered books. Cutting and pasting I jokingly call it. I was going to make David a book. And I did. I took snips of his poems and illustrated? illuminated? them. When I gave it to him it was very moving. I didn't want to say goodbye. I think I'd already defended and packed up my office and... practically out the door. This felt like the last thing. I'll never forget how he paged through it so slowly and looked up and me with his smile. I'll always remember the way he smiled... and he said "this is us." 

So fast-forward back to November-December. The tattoo I got was something from one of the collages in the book, and a snip of poetry to go with it. The picture is of two melded faces, a flower amidst brambles... one of the buds on the flower is not a flower but a dragon's head. The writing below it says "lines we work to know by heart / and measure out the distance of a life." 

Even after all my other work, this is still a tattoo people comment on often. They need to get up close to me and read the text. Despite my personal space issues (I need a lot of it) I let them. Many times, because of the two faces melded together (it sort of looks like a mask, I guess) and the bit about "lines we work to know by heart" they ask if I'm in the theatre. I laugh and say no. Seriously, I would make the worst actor. Sometimes I will tell the full story. Most often I just say, "It's for a friend who died."

This is a shitty, distorted picture taken on a cell phone using my non-dominant hand. It's probably a crime against art that I didn't wait for someone to take a better pic before I blogged this... but I figured if you read all the way to the end, you would want to have an idea of what it looked like.