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Viewpoint Tattoo made its mark on this mother
By MARY VINEYARD
Last summer, at the age of 42, I
decided to get a tattoo -- a cluster of violet grapes and green leaves and
tendrils just above my right ankle.
Inscribing on my body a colorful, permanent symbol was a way of
branding, claiming, possessing myself, with a certainty that whatever ravages
time and age and fate have inflicted on my body, there is one two-by-four inch
plane of my own skin that I unreservedly consider beautiful.
When my daughter was 15, she experienced a violent trauma and
immediately afterwards began begging for permission to get a tattoo on her
chest. I didnt insist that she articulate her reasons, and I think her
desire for a tattoo had begun months earlier. But as a mother I would at that
moment have given her anything -- a ticket to the moon, my own right arm,
anything at all.
As a professional bodyworker, I believed that instinctively,
intuitively, she was making an attempt to reclaim her body as her own, to place
a protective talisman on herself, an eminently wise response to the experience
of being the victim of a crime. The tattoo she chose was simultaneously bright
and dark, whimsical and forceful, and impossible to ignore. A strong young
woman stood firm.
Now, four years later, I was single for the first time in my adult
life and up to my eyebrows in midlife restructuring. When my daughter asked
what I wanted for Mothers Day, I answered that I didnt really want
anything at all anymore. But someday, I said, when Im
thin, when Im stable, when I know who I am, Id love to have a
tattoo.
She looked at me with that penetrating no-nonsense gaze of
untarnished youth and said something like, Thats stupid. Do it
now.
A few days earlier, we had just met a 35-year-old woman whose
teenage sons had surprised her with a navel-piercing for her birthday. Ah, the
wisdom of the young -- leaping over our resistances, our scars, our
self-consciousness and weariness. Do it now, they insist, knowing
something about time we have forgotten.
I asked an artist friend to design my grape cluster. Then my
daughter introduced me to the young man who had done her tattoo. Since my own
children are in their young adulthood and I love them wildly, unquestioningly,
I am positively prejudiced toward young people. It was not difficult at all,
really, to place my health, safety and aesthetic future literally into the
hands of this thin, waifish, tattooed, pierced person barely past boyhood. I
trusted, and it was true, that he was a skilled professional. His touch was
gentle and accurate; he frowned with concentration and over the course of 40
minutes paid utmost attention to the intricate details of piercing flesh and
inserting dye.
I lay back on the reclining chair and willed a steady release of
endorphins into my system, while I gazed around at the oddest decorating scheme
I have ever seen. A large, unlit fish tank held a lone, possibly lonely angel
fish. On shelves were masks of screaming monsters, and on the walls were
posters in that heavy-metal angular, anguished style that must have some
meaning beyond my capacity to understand.
Incongruously, over the door was a very ordinary picture of the
Immaculate Heart of Mary, the kind any grandmother would have had on her
bedroom wall or in her living room shrine. It occurred to me that she
represents, along with similar images of the Sacred Heart or the Crucifixion,
something not so different from the knowledge and feeling people seek in these
various forms of body art -- the pain, the union, the transformation.
When my tattoo was finished I floated outside in a state of mild
ecstasy and for the next few days did the usual dance of babying it, marveling
at it, showing it off. What a high it was to have done a completely superfluous
act, to have identified myself in a unique way and at the same time to have
become linked through a shared physical experience with other beings. Mine is
now part of the huge collection of decorated human bodies, including those of
prisoners and gang members, adolescents initiating themselves and each other
and adults of all ages, classes, races and professions, all making gestures of
self-expression.
I also feel a dark connection to the past, a solidarity with the
millions who were involuntarily tattooed, numbered, in Nazi concentration
camps. And I know I am bound also with animals, our fellow creatures whom we so
blithely brand and clip and tag and label.
I, who avidly avoid fads of all types, who shun pop culture, have
taken my place among the marked multitude. Yet I am more myself, more singular
than ever.
There is an exhilarating power in the belief that every act of
self-possession moves the whole project forward, frees everyone a little. The
ultimate point of individuation is service to the whole: We rise so we can
submit. We separate so that we can rejoin the collective in a more conscious
state.
The pursuit of the elusive, impermanent, ever-fluid I leads again,
always, into the eternal, universal We. All the sparks return, in the end, to
the original flame.
Mary Vineyard writes from Albuquerque, N.M.
National Catholic Reporter, February 19,
1999
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