6 inks

A mini memoir in tattoos

Seahorse

I’m eighteen and I’m going to get a tattoo.

Deep in the bowels of Kensington Market, London - where I bought my first leather jacket and my favourite purple striped trousers, just two ticks on the checklist of choices that marked me out as different long before now - a tattoo artist brands me with a small pink and blue seahorse of my own design at the base of my spine.

It’s not until later that I come across the words ‘tramp stamp’ {a phrase heavy with patriarchy if ever there was one}. I don’t think a seahorse really counts as trampy, if indeed anything actually does. A friend names the seahorse Gus.

I remember the icy burning most of all; a pain I’d come to know well and almost love.

Star

Mexico, I don’t remember where. Maybe Guadalajara, my base during some time spent volunteering and exploring the country during my twenties. I love the heat, the light, the colours, the quesadillas, the landscapes so different from those I grew up in, the sense of adventure, the kindness of the people, the rhythms of their language.

I remember how my clingfilmed arm made sea swims tricky for a while.

It’s strange, I don’t recall any details about the appearance of the star on my right forearm; just that I like it as a translation of my name in Sanskrit, and I have started to develop a compulsion to add art to my body.

More Stars

New Zealand, Queenstown. Another solo trip, during which I stay with a very kind cousin, and travel by bus around both islands.

In the town of adventurous sporting activities - in which I do not participate beyond a boat trip into Milford Sound, which could hardly be described as adventurous - a man scatters five smaller stars, trailing up my right forearm from the Mexican one to my wrist. A constellation in blue.

Pisces

Somewhere in the world - for reasons best known to itself my memory is not supplying the location or circumstance - a woman inks a drawing I made of my star sign on the top of my left foot. A simple sketch of curves and swirls, and those two fish, always swimming away from each other, always joined by a thread.

That sweet sharp searing pain, intensifying where the skin stretches thin.

Waves

Mexico again. Sayulita this time, many years after the first trip. I’m lonely. I lean too hard on small connections and am embarrassed by my need. I feel vulnerable and separated.

With a single line I draw three waves, each increasing in size, and take them to a local tattoo artist to have them placed under my right ankle. Each wave a message of growth and expansion.

Lotus

Hove, East Sussex. My home for ten years and the site of some of my most profound healing.

I spend a long time constructing my largest and most complex tattoo yet, taking inspiration from Pinterest searches, reworking and adding to what I find to make it my own. A patterned lotus, a shape that some interpret as the number 8 but is also the shape of infinity, and two lines from a film I haven’t seen that embedded themselves in my being long before they were inked on my skin. It takes me a long time to get the design how I want it, and to choose the font that feels just right.

In the basement of a bar near my home, a man with a hairless dog spends several hours scoring ink into my left shoulder.

I have sea foam in my veins.
I understand the language of waves.

From Le Testament d’Orphée - Jean Cocteau

Birds

St Ives, Cornwall. I drop by a tattoo parlour to ask about getting birds in flight inked up my other arm. The artist, a woman, all but sneers at me. “That’s so boring, everyone gets that one.” It’s like a slap; unexpected and shocking. I leave and don’t come back. What does she know of what birds in flight mean to me? And why would she care?

The tattoos are punctuation marks that link me to my past selves across the decades. Messages mostly hidden, laden with personal history, memory, and meaning.

A new one is already designed, ready for the next person to leave a mark on my skin.