~This
essay previously appeared in Soundings
Review (2014).
January: The idea worms
its way into my head as I start anticipating—you might even say obsessing about—my
October birthday. While I accept my senior status and its dubious benefits with
appropriate aplomb and all the grace I can muster, damn it, I won’t go down without
a fight. I want to do something symbolic, something tangible and visible, something
out of character. A tattoo—that’s it!—I’ll get a tattoo. And I’ll write about
it.
February: It’s a dramatic
undertaking for me. Once it might have been thought radical or subversive—foolish
for an old broad, maybe—but not now. I read about the recent proliferation of
tattoos on women in Margot Mifflin’s Bodies
of Subversion: A Secret History of Women & Tattoo, which traces the
phenomenon from a Native American
captive in 1858 with a chin tattoo to the explosion of popularity over the past
20 years. Until recently tattoos carried a stigma of tawdriness for most women,
although they became a fad in late 19th-century European and American
elite society (usually tucked away in places that could be covered by clothing).
Winston Churchill’s mother—the infamous Jennie—had a snake eating its tail, the
symbol of eternity, inked on her wrist. Janis Joplin was one of the
first celebrities to display them—a bracelet on her wrist, a tiny heart on her
chest. Now they’re a fashion
statement across age and class, and in 2012, for the first time, women got more
tattoos than men. A political statement too: Mifflin sees women’s tattoos as “badges
of self-determination at a time when controversies about abortion rights, date
rape, and sexual harassment have made them think hard about who controls their
bodies—and why.” Right on, sisters!
March: The only people
I’ve told are my husband and my daughter, Jennifer. Both were incredulous but
enthusiastic. Jennifer has two tattoos, a small flower on her ankle and the
Chinese symbol for strength on her wrist. “What’s with the number 4?” people
asked when she first got it—that’s what it looked like—so she added a leafy
sprig to soften the image. Sara, my good friend and former colleague of nearly
20 years, tells me at our monthly lunch date that her daughter and son and
their spouses went to Las Vegas for the weekend and came home with new tattoos.
Her daughter has several—I remember Sara’s horror at Kristin’s first one, more
than 10 years ago—and she still doesn’t like them. Can’t understand why anyone would do it. How will she feel about it in
20 years? Yadda yadda. So how can I resist? I tell her my plan. She looks
at me as if I’ve lost my mind, then starts firing questions and making
suggestions. Shoulder? Hip? Ankle? Cat? Flower? Book?
April: Buju Tattoo is
just a couple of blocks from my house. It opened last year and doesn’t look
like a stereotypical tattoo parlor. Seedy, bikerish—you know. Other neighborhood
shops, with provocative names like Sailor’s Grave and Sinister Ink, display photos
of bare-chested or Harley-suited models touting skulls, snarling beasts,
big-breasted women. Potted succulents line the front window of Buju. An antique
bench sits out front, and Victorian parlor furniture graces the reception area.
The walls are painted aqua and hung with eclectic bric-a-brac. A dog, a real
one—the eponymous Buju, a mild-mannered pit bull—roams the shop. The tattoo
artists are dreadlocked young women with decorated limbs—walking works of art
advertising their trade. I make a reconnaissance visit and introduce myself to
Meg, look at photo samples of her work. The shop is clean and neat; I like the
ambiance and Meg. She’s in the midst of producing an intricate, multi-colored
pattern on a young woman’s ample thigh, buzzing away as we chat. I say to her
patron, “You don’t look like you’re in pain.” “I took a Vicodin before I came,”
she tells me; “I always do.” She has several elaborate designs already; this new
one will take several hours over two appointments. Meg suggests I come in for a
consult if I want to discuss ideas or contact her when I’m ready to schedule. It’s
starting to feel real. So is my essay—I’m taking notes along the way, inkings
about my inking.
May:
What’s it going to be? I’ve been pondering this since day one, and a protracted
process of elimination narrows the field. No quotations (not even from Virginia
Woolf), no new-age slogans or pithy proverbs. No images representing love or
peace, Elvis or Paris. I scrutinize tattoos, inspecting arms and legs, necks
and behind ears, bared midsections. Many come with stories. A young friend,
Sandy, back from two years in Micronesia as a Peace Corps volunteer, tells me
how the memory of swimming with the parrotfish evokes the sights and colors,
smells and sounds of the island. On her upper arm, a big bright blue-green
parrotfish—copied from a 19th-century scientific illustration—pays
homage to her experience. Years ago, before tattoos were trendy, I met a woman
who had a disfiguring gouge in the back of her calf, the result of an injury. She
was embarrassed by it until she had it transformed into a shark bite with the predator’s
open jaws wrapped around the indentation. “Tattoos for the Terrified” is posted
online for people who worry that they’re not cool because they don’t have a
tattoo. Suggestions include a heart inscribed with “Mom” and “contact in case
of emergency;” a mermaid wearing a life preserver; the Chinese character for regret.
Anne Fadiman, one of my favorite essayists, wrote that after 9/11, the Macdougal
Street Tattoo parlor in Greenwich Village gave free tats to nearly 500 World
Trade Center rescue workers. Lots of flags, no doubt, and “God bless America.”
June:
The winnowing down continues. I consider images from nature, but no cats
or roses, nothing too cutesy or common. I like the symmetry and symbolism of lotus
blossoms but learn that only roses are more popular among flower tattoos. I garden
and I love my cats, but that’s not what I want to say about myself—I weed out
all flora and fauna. Slogans are big: tattoos are the new bumper stickers. “Life
will go on” runs down the arm of a restaurant server; my grandson sports “The
sky’s the limit.” On the cover of Vogue
or Vanity Fair a couple of years ago,
Angelina Jolie brandished a passage from Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas on her arm: “As a woman I have no country. As a woman
I want no country.” Jolie’s much-publicized inkings include a Buddhist prayer,
Arabic script, a Latin phrase, Roman numerals, a Bengal tiger. She had a dragon
emblazoned with the name of her second husband, Billy Bob Thornton. After they
split up it took five sessions to have it removed, and Jolie said, “I’ll never
be stupid enough to have a man’s name tattooed on me again.” Who am I? I’m a
reader and a writer, but I don’t want words, any words, in any language. I scan
literary tattoos. One site claims, “Couples break up, ‘YOLO’ goes out of style,
but the literature you love is forever.” After I look up YOLO (“you only live
once”—am I the only one who doesn’t know?) I scroll through images from The Great Gatsby and The Little Prince, Alice in Wonderland and
Harry Potter, Kerouac, Hemingway, Austen. I’m an ardent Virginia Woolfophile,
and sites abound with Woolf photos, book covers, and quotes (many from A Room of One’s Own).
July: I have it—an
elegant image that pays tribute to my avocation and my muse. My blog heading
has these lines from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando:
“For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it
falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and
festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.” Not the quote, of
course—I’m going to have a quill pen and inkpot. Maybe on a sheet of parchment
or an open book. I ask Meg what she thinks. “That would be so cool,” she says.
“Send me some examples of ones you like.” There are hundreds, maybe thousands
of images online. Pick a feather, any feather. I choose several with simple
lines but lots of texture, and a clean, no-nonsense inkpot. I drop the book and
paper—too busy, too many metaphors.
August: I’m ready. I scrap
the inkpot, scaling the design down to the utmost in simplicity: just the
quill. I coordinate dates with Jennifer—I want her with me for physical and
moral support. Like when I took her, at 13, to get her ears pierced, only now
the roles are reversed. “It’ll hurt less on your shoulder,” she tells me, but I
envision the distinctive vertical image at my ankle. I make an appointment and put
down a $60 deposit—a major investment for me, so there’s no backing out. I give
Meg a page of images, and she makes a stencil, her own take on it, which I
approve.
September: On a Saturday
afternoon, four weeks before my birthday, I lie face-down on the table, toes
sticking over the edge. Like when I get acupuncture on my feet, which I’ve been
doing for the past year—I make a mental note of the similarities. As Meg starts
in just behind my ankle bone I feel the pinpricks of irritation, like buzzing
insects. “Doing OK?” Meg asks me a few times, and I assure her that I am. Jenn
and I chatter, and after about 20 minutes that seem like five, Meg says “You’re
done.” We admire it and Jenn takes a photo: a perfect plume with a squiggle of
ink trailing its nib. Black with soft shadings to give it a feathery look,
about three inches high. Classy. Cool. As we’re leaving the shop, one of the
other tattoo artists asks, “Is this your first?” I say yes, and with a broad knowing
smile, he says, “Permanently cool.” There’s
the title of my essay, I think as I walk proudly out the door.
*****
THE STORY BEHIND THE ESSAY
As soon as I made up my mind to get
a tattoo, I knew I would write about it. I kept notes along the way to capture
the progression of my thinking along with actual events. The symbolism of the
act—thumbing my nose at impending old age—was of key importance, yet I didn’t
acknowledge until the essay was completed and published that I had evaded what
was most significant about it—the fact that it was to commemorate my seventieth
birthday. I mentioned a momentous birthday, my senior status, my advancing
years, but I didn’t disclose my age, left it to the reader’s imagination to
figure out, maybe to assume that I was turning sixty. I believed I wouldn’t be
taken seriously if I admitted my true age. A new essay, not yet published, confronts
my ambivalence about aging, my evasion of it in past writing. No regrets about
the tattoo—after three years I still take pleasure from it and what it
represents.
*****
ABOUT ALICE LOWE
Alice Lowe reads and writes about
life and literature, food and family. Her personal essays have appeared in numerous
literary journals, including 1966, Adelaide,
The Baltimore Review, Brevity, Crab Creek Review, The Millions, Permafrost, Room, and The Tishman Review. Her work is cited among the Notable Essays in
the 2016 Best American Essays and was
nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology. Alice is the author of numerous
essays and reviews on Virginia Woolf’s life and work, including two monographs
published by Cecil Woolf Publishers in London. Alice lives in San Diego,
California and blogs at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.
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