Dermis Deep Memories

When I was younger I would sit at the feet of my grandfather every Sunday when his army buddies would come over and swap stories, drink beer, and take a second to breathe after the long days on the farms many of them owned. These men, all around the age of 70, were well worn from life but supremely happy. Their faces were cracked with wrinkles washed into their cheeks and foreheads with the ebb and flow of emotions that accompany a well- lived life.  Their hands and arms were scarred by their days before and after their tour in the pacific; cuts and scrapes from moments I would never know anything about. On a few of these men, right next to these same origin-less scars, were the now faded black lines of tattoos acquired long ago. Every once in a while one would point to a worn and misshapen image on his bicep and tell a story about a bawdy night the gang had in bar on some little island in the middle of the ocean. I never understood the emotion that would wash over their faces then; an emotion that I now recognize as nostalgia, all I knew was that these warped images held in them a world apart from the one these men now knew and the simple act of looking at them took them back to that place, if only for a moment. It was these moments, surrounded by men much wiser than myself, which impressed upon me the importance of memories; making them, keeping them, and having a reminder to remember them.

            As I got older, it was made abundantly clear to me that the tattoos I loved as a child were viewed in a less than positive light by the other adults around me. My father, most notably, associated tattoos with the criminals he saw stream through the doors of the city/county building he worked in. This fact later, when I started getting tattoos of my own, became a major point of contention between the two of us. The negative correlations he made didn’t make much sense to me. In my mind, my father saying all people with tattoos were criminals was the same as saying all Asian people drive poorly; it just seemed ignorant. So, with the cavalier disregard possessed by every teenager, I received my first tattoo three days after my eighteenth birthday.

            The tattoo itself is small, no bigger than a fifty-cent piece on the outside of my left ankle and was a symbol that I had discovered searching the internet. It wasn’t until later that I realized that the ‘trigram’ I had picked out was most notably associated with Led Zeppelin. I knew going into to it that I had picked John Paul Jones’s symbol; I just didn’t think other people knew that. So, by the time it was on my ankle I had already been asked twice if I was a Zeppelin fan.

             Most of the time I forget I have it now. When I do notice it, I remember what it felt like to be eighteen; a feeling that, as I get farther away from it, begins to feel less like a memory and more like a different world. In truth, I don’t know if I remember much of anything from being eighteen. I remember the big life events; graduation, my sister’s wedding, and my father’s stroke but I don’t remember the everyday. I wouldn’t remember what it was like to get dinner with friends and what it felt like to be heartbroken at eighteen if I didn’t have this now completely insignificant tattoo. This tiny permanent mark anchors me to a moment in time I would have otherwise forgotten. Often, it is the moments that seem the most insignificant that, with time, we learn to miss the most. Seven years later, I still remember sitting around a table at the Applebee’s downtown with a group of my friends. I still remember being devastated that the guy I had been “dating” had shown up with a girl just to spite me and I remember an hour later walking into a tattoo parlor for the first time and never looking back.

            These tattoos that cover my body are just as much a rite of passage as the tattoos received by some African women when they reach marrying age or young Polynesian boys who are literally marked as the next chief. The difference being that these young boys and girls rarely have a choice about when, where and what they are getting tattooed. I do have these choices. Because of this, I choose to mark myself with images that remind me of times worth remembering and situations worth learning from. In some small, yet still meaningful way, the tattoos I have chosen tell my story to the world around me. In the same way children are marked by their societies in Africa and on the Polynesian Islands, my tattoos are the marks of my societies; they tie me to the cultures I came of age in, matured in, and currently live in and even though these societies may change, my experience within them does not.

            On the inside of my right wrist is tattooed the word “aplomb” atop an ichthus; a simple drawing of a fish used by early Christians. For a large portion of my life, I considered myself a Christian. This tattoo was, initially, to remind me to not let my temper get the best of me and that the grace to compose myself would come from Christ. At the time, it helped me visualize the person I wanted to be and brought me closer to the people around me struggling with the same questions of faith. Over the six years I have had this tattoo, I have changed. I no longer consider myself a Christian and I no longer associate daily with the people who I once shared so much with. However, these people and this faith forever changed who I was and permanently altered my life’s path. People who meet me now are always taken aback by the very visible presence of this little fish on my wrist. To them, it doesn’t seem to represent the person they have come to know; a person who loves to study faith but has very little of it herself. I have been asked a few times why I don’t have it changed. My answer is always the same; to change this tattoo would be to erase a time of my life. By changing this tattoo I would be forcing myself to forget those same feelings and people who shaped me and ultimately made me into a better person. Many people believe, as I do, that tattoos represent, in some way, the person the owner wants the world to see. If the world is going to see me, I want them to see all of me; past and present. Not just the person I happen to be in the moment.

            By the time I was twenty, I had three relatively small tattoos. My parents, begrudgingly, began to ignore them and I continued to get them. My mother, always the better communicator of my two parents, was the first to question the permanence of my body art. She too had seen the faded and disfigured images on the arms of her father and his friends and was amazed that I would want such images on my own body. In truth, I didn’t really think about the long term visual implication of my tattoos until she asked me. Consciously, I knew what would happen to them as I aged but with the blindness of youth I simply ignored the very really future. What was strange was that the very things about old tattoos that scared my mother were the things I found I loved most about them. None of the men sitting in those beaten up lawn chairs ever hid their tattoos away. They wore them as badges of honor. Sagging faced pin-up girls became a beacon of longevity.  It wasn’t the tattoo itself that reminded these men they were still alive, it was the years lived with the tattoo and all the memories that came along with those years.

            Sometimes, but not often, the stories they told while pointing to their tattoos were tinged with regret; moments that could have been lived better. One man had the symbols of his battalion tattooed on to his forearm. Otto, a kind man with soft eyes and a ready embrace, would look at his tattoo and remember, what he called, his “great cowardice.” He would tell a story about being so scared in his foxhole that he froze in action, watching his brothers in arms fall around him. What amazed me, even as a child, was that while Otto very clearly felt shame for this, his voice was always resolved. His eyes would harden on a spot off in the horizon as if taking a silent vow to those fallen brothers. Every time he looked at his tattoo he re-lived that moment and felt that shame and every time he looked at it he resolved to never let it happen again. Regret is never easy to live with. It strips you from the inside out and forces you to question even the smallest of decisions. The beautiful thing about regret is that, given time, it changes form. It morphs from a debilitating gut feeling to a vow-inducing lesson. Because of Otto, I never shy away from getting tattoos when my life becomes almost too much to bare. Though sometimes difficult to look at, these tattoos give me my greatest hope and an invaluable reminder of my past.

             One of these tattoos, a cottonwood leaf on the back of my neck, started as a simple tribute to the one place I will always call home; Nebraska. My move, sometimes called my “great migration” by my mother, was instigated by a desire to start anew after a severe depression. This one rash decision, made over exactly one week, served to be one of the greatest and worst decisions of my life. At twenty-one years old, I dropped out of school, packed my things and said good-bye only to my family. Even then I knew that no matter how far I ran, I couldn’t run forever; I knew I would be back. Three days before I headed south I received my fifth tattoo.  The cottonwood leaf, from Nebraska’s state tree, accompanied me as I moved over 800 miles from Lincoln to Austin, Texas. This leaf, out of sight but never really out of mind, became a brand and, when brought up in conversation, served to keep me tied to a place that, at the time, felt like the source of unimaginable sorrow.

            As more and more time passed, and introductions turned into friendships, I began to learn a lesson many people learn but few accept: all relationships take work. These new friendships soon became more complicated than the ones I had fled from. After two years, I decided to pack up once again and move back home. Now, when people ask me about my leaf tattoo I am washed in the shame of a failed escape and resolved in my decision to return. It is still there as a constant reminder of a life I could have, but shouldn’t have, lived. As much as I loved Austin and as much as I sometimes miss my time there, it was never where I was supposed to be and the added shame that I chose to run from, instead of face, my problems only serves to amplify the lessons learned from that experience.

            Through all of the painful memories and questionable decisions, I have never once felt regret. My experiences test my resolve daily and keep me questioning every step before I take it, not after. I live my life with the knowledge that on a day that will come sooner than I would like, I may not be able to recall the simplest things. So, I rejoice in tattoos more permanent than my memories. Their stories are my stories and when I have been silenced by old age, they will remain as a testament to the memories I can no longer recall. Tattoos are more than just a pretty design. They are complex symbols telling stories of the life of the owner. Within the intricate needle work and colorful designs live the breaths and memories of the people who choose to cover themselves in ink; witness and memoir to a life well-lived.