It’s been around five years since I plucked up the courage and got my first tattoo. I have a literal armful in the meantime and plans are in place and designs are decided for the other arm, because hey, I have two. I have had it relayed to me that someone (who apparently does not know me really well) was wondering what had gotten into me that I went and had those ink smudges done, and what is up with them anyway, as me and my tattoos don’t have anything in common. Which I find hilarious, as far as comments go.
I mean… the only ever valid answer one needs to give when being asked “Why did you get tattooed?” is “Because I wanted to.”. The question of why a certain motif was picked is slightly trickier and a lot more personal, and frankly not for a stranger to ask. If I tattooed a quote on my skin in Tolkien Elvish or in Gallifreyan, it was so that random people on the bus could not read it. Nearly every single piece of the tattoo jigsaw on my arm is a piece of my soul finding a form of expression. It’s like I have turned myself inside out and am quite literally wearing, if not my heart on my sleeve, then my soul on my skin.
It’s been five years ago that my stylized dragon landed on my upper right arm. It was a sort of birthday present to myself. I had been finding tattoos appealing since my teenage years, occasionally using those stick-on tattoos from music magazines when they had designs I liked, so it wasn’t exactly an overnight decision to get it done. It had been a mix of “what would people (in specific and in particular) say?”, “I don’t think I can take the pain”, “looks like a risky procedure”, and not daring to step outside the expectations I felt constricting me that had been holding me back.
By the time my birthday rolled around in 2015, I had been living on my own and in another country for half a year. I was good at what I was doing, I was getting paid well, and I had a good support system of friends here. And I had started asking myself a lot of hard questions about myself and my life – some of which still have me in knots today. But, something in me had also begun to… uncoil, for lack of a better word. Some… sense of self that had been bundled up and sought definition and fulfilment inside my head only had started to seek the light of day. To be frank, it is a painful and ongoing process, trying to piece yourself together when you are not sure what the end picture is supposed to look like.
A friend looking for an appointment to get a tattoo gave the final nudge. I spent weeks agonizing over what was supposed to become my one and only tattoo. It had to be just right. So it had to be a dragon. I found it summed me up well enough – from my reading and gaming preferences, to my penchant for escapism, to the mythical struggle I was casting my life to be, with me as an unlikely hero… Finding a design that suited me was even harder – I wanted neither a cartoonish or fantasy version, nor a Chinese dragon… I wanted it to be suggestive, discreet, very much dragon, but very much inobtrusive. And then it pretty much happened, and I had a disproportionate feeling of accomplishment.
The next bits followed without a predefined plan other than “I want my tattoo to mean something to me”. I got a compass / world / dreamcatcher for my love of travel and losing myself in strange cities (or finding myself). I knew I wanted music, so I went for sheet music wrapped around my upper arm (by far the most painful tattoo), but it had to be a song with meaning. So I ended up with Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, specifically the bit that reads “there’s a feeling I get when I look to the West, and my spirit is crying for leaving”. It was my theme song for a long time before taking the leap and trying this whole immigration business, and it also always reminded me of the longing for the Grey Havens.
Next was one of the few poem stanzas I remember from one of the few Romanian poets I liked… but since I did not want everyone reading it, it’s in Gallifreyan, the script used in the TV series Doctor Who, with it’s finely lined circles within circles that made my tatoo artist joke about drawing pac-man on me. “If I were to rise to stars, called upon to join the throngs of gods, I would not accept to fly other than by my own wings.” It was followed by English transliterated in Elven script for what I chose to be a tribute to one of my favorite bands, Muse. The chorus of Starlight circled my lower arm, on the other side of the dreamcatcher-world-compass: “I will be chasing a star light until the end of my life.”.
So by this point, the theme is firmly, and most definitely there. I mean, of course, if you can read sheet music, Gallifreyan and Elvish. The rest of the bits start falling into place, to die the separate, fine line tattoos that splatter all over my arm now into one cohesive sleeve. There comes a smattering of stars between the sheet music lines. An ink splash raven flies above the world compass, with ink blots scattered around. Some of them are getting mixed up with bird silhouettes of books that have taken flight. Some dandelions’ seeds are also turning into birds. A lighthouse, my remote dream home away from people has sprung up on the side of my wrist. On my wrist itself, there’s freedom in typewriter font, with the top of the “m” also flying away. Somewhere in between comes to only fully readable sentence: “We are all made of stars.”
The inside of my elbow is still immaculate skin – but I have an idea of what fits the theme and the style of the tattoo.
The second arm will be covered in a huge wing, shoulderblade to elbow. Once I pluck up the courage and whene this virus is not holding people and dreams for ransom anymore. The wing idea has been there long, the wing design was found in another computer game, which I find sublimely ironic and highly appropriate.
What I was lacking, was a matching finish to the sleeve, something for my lower arm. In the meantime, I resolved for it to somehow incorporate another quote. I stumbled upon it in a book of one of my favorite authors, Alexis Hall, only to discover it was a quote from Rabindranath Tagore. And just reading the poet’s name gave me a flashback to a summer a lifetime ago – warm and still, marked by insects buzzing and hens clucking and the smell of an old house. I was visiting my paternal grandmother, a city kid bored by life in the countryside in that quiet village, scared of pigs and roosters, taking refuge in a smelly room that triggered my allergies. But there on the shelf I had found a volume of poetry by Tagore, translated into Romanian. And I do not remember much of it, but I remember the delight I found in those words and the escape they provided. And don’t books always…?
It is all me. Bits and pieces, some more significant than others. But they help me spell out pieces of my soul that I spent three decades searching for and for which I still somehow lack words. They help me keep track of things that are or were important. They help me remind myself that through tiredness, and jadedness, and loneliness, and hopelessness, and bitterness, and anger, and hurt, and frustration, and low-key depression… I have until now found a path. And I can keep finding it, even if I have to carve it in my skin.
