April, the cruellest month, permanently on my arm

So I did a thing last night! I got a tattoo!

I wouldn’t say I’m really a “tattoo person.” I have one other one, a silhouetted black cat on my ankle that I got when I was in my early 20s. I still like that one a lot and don’t regret it. I am not sure I’ll get any others… but this one felt important for me to do.

The lovely and talented Kathryn kept me entertained and distracted during the whole process.

The artist I chose is one who specializes in fine, delicate lines. Apparently this means using fewer, smaller needles and not going as deep into the skin. Given the intricate detail in my design, this seemed like a smart choice. I don’t want it to spread or become muddy later.

Plus, it didn’t really hurt. Kathryn told me it would be more annoying than painful, and she was right. It felt like I was being scratched with a moderately pointy stick for three hours. Annoying for sure. Painful… eh, not really.

The design is my own artwork combined with the first four lines of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” The line art drawings I created are all images and symbols of nature — outdoor scenes, cacti, trees, leaves, flowers, fish, coral-like squiggles, fish-like amoebas, suns, moons, and stars… and one fire-breathing chicken-dragon.

A lot of people have asked me why I chose the Eliot passage and if it has a special meaning to me. It absolutely does — I sat with this idea for many months and it felt right that whole time. I would not commit something permanently to my body that didn’t speak to my heart. (Kathryn and I had a whole conversation at the tattoo studio about a TV show featuring people getting terrible tattoos covered up — people who clearly didn’t think it through before committing to, say, a tattoo of a giant dick on their inner thigh. She said, “Their stories inevitably start with ‘Me and my mates were down at the pub…’”)

Anyway, I’ve been in love with Eliot’s poems “The Hollow Men” and “The Waste Land” since I first read them with a fellow poet-friend in college. The older I get, the more meaning I seem to be able to take away from poems I love. And those lines remind me of a lot of things, including: change is inevitable, change is painful and exhausting, things happen in cycles, there is always a bit of green just under the surface when things feel bleak, and even if you feel like you can’t go on, you’ll go on anyway. 

Plus, it’s just kind of neat to have my own art permanently on my body.

Here’s my original drawing. The artist made the lines a little thinner (so they wouldn’t go muddy over the years) and she did a really nice job staying true to the spirit of my design.