Tattood and Tabooed

My Dad is convinced I have a tattoo. I do. Actually, I have several. I have one big one on my stomach and three or four smaller ones on my side. I also have a few temporary tattoos on my face and hands.

Okay, Dad, take your nitro pills. I don't actually have any permanent ink on my body. I don't have any semi-permanent ink on my body for that matter. What I do have are scars and living. I have traces of time and culture on my face. My body is tattooed, just not by a needle.

I have often contemplated tattoos (hence my Dad's conviction that I MUST be sporting one behind his back--clearly he forgets I'm the skittish child). When my beloved childhood pet and best friend died, I thought about marking my body permanently with a snowflake to mark his existence; I thought at the time my body was already going to be scarred, so why not? I thought about having the Tree of Life tattooed on me somewhere as a personal symbol of my appreciation of the mysteries and and cycle of life and personal strife. I wanted a cherry blossom tattooed henna-style on the back of my neck as a symbol of the strength of something seemingly weak.



Instead, when my cat died, I chose to grow my hair for a year without cutting it a single time. I love mythology and traditions. I heard/read/saw a story about women who cut their hair as a sign of mourning for a lost loved one in a time and culture when short hair on a woman either meant she was somehow shamed or deeply lost in grief. Knowing how meaningless cutting my hair would be, I chose to grow it for a full year without a single cut. Instead of tattooing the Tree of Life or cherry blossoms on my body, I chose real scars that changed my life forever.

They're ugly scars. They're ugly in the way I would imagine my Dad feels about tattooed skin. Most people pull away from even thinking about them. I look at them a lot. They're symbols of the line I cut in my "fate" to be who I had always been by birth. I freed myself, with a lot of help from my family and my doctors, from any
path I didn't want to travel. Like a soldier should be, I am proud of my scars. I'll show them to anyone (ask my Dad who often gasps "My God, April" with a little bit of horror and a small amount of amazement, I think, when I do show them off). I feel as though I earned their ugliness. I feel as though they are my connection to something and someone who might not exist anymore.

Most people, I believe, are reluctant to think the way I do about my scars. It's scary. Mostly you just want to escape that kind of recognition...but...I don't. I never want to forget because to do so would be to pretend who I am is some kind of magic trick where I, as I am now, have popped into existence the way witness protection identities do. I am not afraid of who I was; I want her to be remembered for what she was--who she was is who I am...with a few new tattoos.