welcome to the first “season” of nervous wreckage in 2024!
you can find me in your inbox every thursday for the next six weeks. paid subscribers will get full access to all six mini-essays, but don’t worry—free subscribers will still get full access to four out of six, with short previews of the final two.
Last June, I got my first tattoo. It is a small oval, through which you can see abstract, gentle waves.
I have always loved and gravitated towards the ocean. I grew up down the street from a beach on Long Island Sound. My parents met while teaching sailing camp to kids just north of Boston. My grandfather served in the navy. Both sets of grandparents could see the ocean from their houses and I would peer out at it from their windows when I stayed with them. I go to the beach every summer and it is where I feel refreshed, renewed. The idea of living far from water sounds hellish and stifling. So water seemed like an appropriate tattoo for me.
I went with an artist named Marissa. She was from Boston, where most of my extended family was from, so I knew she’d understand my love of New England’s ocean. She also knew that it was my first tattoo and that I was so excited but also so, so nervous.
I am a child of the 1990s—I grew up hearing that tattoos were for gang members and drug dealers and “shady characters.” Even after living in Brooklyn for a decade surrounded by tatted folks constantly, those voices still echoed in my head, despite feeling a constant tug towards the idea of getting one one day. Why would I choose to do this to myself? What if I hate it? I’m doing something I can’t fully take back—will I regret it?
Plus, I got it on my upper arm, and I hate my upper arms. They have always been thick. I carry weight there no matter how much I weight and how many weights I lift. They make me self-conscious.
Would getting a tattoo help me love my arms, or just focus more attention on them?
Do I even need to tell you I was anxious about all this?
Spoiler alert: I’m so glad I chose what I chose, I loved the experience, and the placement and I love my tattoo. Marissa made the experience one that was warm, thoughtful, educational, and consent-informed. She spent hours with me designing the water tattoo of my dreams (which was harder to do than you’d think! the movement of water makes it tough to convey in 2D), and then spent a lot of time teaching me about tattooing—here’s what a credible tattoo artist will or won’t do; here’s what to look for in regards to cleanliness; here’s how to spot an infected or blown-out tattoo. She took extra time to make sure I understood the healing and aftercare process. I felt so held and so seen. Nothing about it was sketchy—it was warm, generous, loving, and personal.
I teach, and I felt like a student in her care. She met me where I was at in my anxiety. She showed me how the body moves, shifts, and evolves, and how to place art in such a way that works with my body rather than against it.
And the tattoo itself? It was better than I could have dreamed. It was beautiful, stunning. I’d been told it takes time to adjust to seeing yourself with a tattoo, but I didn’t experience this at all (in part because the tattoo was small), but also because it felt as if it had always been there, just beneath the surface.
It was me. It was a part of me as if it always had been. And now, I actually liked my upper arm. I loved it, even. I wanted to show it off. I wanted others to see it, and I enjoyed when folks asked about my tattoos. When my dearest friends saw it, several said independently, “it’s like it’s always been there.”
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I’ve always been put off by a certain kind of rhetoric around tattoos. The idea that tattoos were a lapse in judgement, or something to avoid at all costs, like doing interpretive dance in traffic or swimming with great white sharks while menstruating. It never really made sense to me.
The stories we tell around tattoos as a society still reflect this to some extent. When I did my Googles for quotes about tattoos, a number of quotes popped up from older celebrities poking fun at or looking down on tattooing. Memes about Ariana Grande’s hilariously bad hand tattoo promoting a new album pop up, among other ridiculous scandals. When I searched Substack (side eye.jpg) for stories about tattoos, I was confronted with religious-tinged screeds about refraining from “vice” as well as the heroism of a doctor helping convicts remove their racist or gang-related tatts. And what that doctor is doing is, in many ways, wonderful. But some of the moralism around it is…dubious.
I tried watching the reality competition show “Inkmaster,” but it was all about machismo and tattoo artists tearing each other down, which was at odds with my experiences and the experiences of folks I knew with tattoos (not to mention the weird racism and calling clients “canvases”).
These kinds of stories make it sound as if every tattoo has its origins in hate, sin, ill intent, toxic masculinity, and life-altering crimes. Obviously, this is not the case. For a visual phenomena that seems so ubiquitous these days, there weren’t many narratives about tattoos that included even a modicum of nuance or historical context.
Stories about tribal and cultural tattoos can quickly veer into nasty cultural appropriation and creepy imperialism. I don’t have the room here to get into full detail, but just know that tattooing was, and still is, an essential part of many indigenous cultures, and has been seen on human remains dating back millennia. Indigenous Polynesian, Egyptian, and Greek cultures, and hell, even a group of people in modern-day Scotland called “Picts” (or “painted ones”) by the Romans are all proof that even if tattoos are “trendy” amongst certain groups today, they are far from a fad. And that’s just to name a few groups.
In fact, a surefire way to know if a culture has been whitewashed and patriarchy has taken hold is to see how their tattoos are demonized or shamed throughout history. Kakiniit and tuniit are tattoos typically given to Inuit women in Arctic and subarctic North America as symbol of the transition to womanhood (which was alluded to in the most recent season of True Detective). These practices were outlawed by the Catholic church for decades, but are now seen as a form of empowerment for indigenous women. [Note: while it’s not my place to write at length about Indigenous tattoos, but I strongly suggest you read up on this using these links if it interests you.]
The 19th-century Czech-born painter Gottfried Lindaeur painted Western-style portraits of Māori people in New Zealand with their tā moko, or identity-specific tattoos. This included women’s moko kauae, or traditional lip/chin tattoos (read more about these forms of tattoos here and here). While Lindaeur’s attention to detail when painting these tattoos has been praised and could be seen as progressive, the popularity of his style of portrait painting was also waning at this time. Put it another way: the “otherness” of the tattoos in his paintings helped him to gain attention and make money. Tattoos were only worthy of praise when they benefitted a white artist looking for success.
There’s a certain fetishization of purity around the body and skin that, to me, felt not unlike the purity culture fetishized by Christianity. In a world drenched in this rhetoric the tattooed body, particularly the tattooed woman’s body, was seen as corrupted, impure, ugly, and useless. Damaged goods. Undesirable. It was, above all, a disappointment. In other words: what a ungenerous and disappointing take on a very personal choice, one that sounds oddly familiar…
Yes, some of this is generational. Americans under 50 are far more likely to have a tattoo. According to Pew Research, 32% of American adults had at least one tattoo as of 2023. 46% of people between the ages of 30 - 49, the age group I am in, are tattooed, while 41% of folks under 30 have at least one tattoo. Though this tracks with my own experience, what surprised me most was that women were far more likely to have tattoos than men—38% of all women in the United States have at least one tattoo versus 27% of men.
In fact, responses to me wanting to get a tattoo were met with far more ambivalence at times than, say, having a baby, arguably one of the most permanent choices I could make regarding my body. Hell, my dermatologist gave me a permanent scar just a month before I got that first tattoo when she removed a suspicious looking mole on my leg. Thankfully it wasn’t cancerous. But that was a forever change, one I didn’t have much choice in now did I?
Yet not one discourages me from getting pregnant at this point (the moment you turn 30, everyone has to remind you that you should get pregnant soon, as if maybe you forgot for a fraction of a second!!!!!!!!).
(And yes, OBVIOUSLY tattoos are cosmetic, childbirth and moles are health-related, I get it! Nowhere near total equivalency here! All I’m saying is: why is one choice I make about my body seen as “better” than another?)
I know, I know, I’m conflating tattoos with reproductive rights and human rights violations here. But I’m also trying to argue that folks with the fewest rights are more likely to take control of their body by getting a tattoo. Yes, I’m attempting to tango on a trapeze wire. Sarah, what are you doing?! Correlation doesn’t mean causation!!!!!!!!
In other words: your body is a temple, but the only forever-changes that are acceptable are the ones that others deem as good or necessary. Opting into seemingly frivolous yet permanent changes are…No Good and Very Bad, Actually.
These takes also conveniently leave out the tattoos that people opt into due to bodily traumas, or that are still done to them because they likely have no other choice. Those who undergo radiation treatment for cancer are oftentimes tattooed with three dots across the chest to ensure consistency between treatments. I’ve become fascinated by a tattoo artist on TikTok who specializes in tattooing nipples on people who have undergone mastectomies. And some tattoo artists specialize in working with scar tissue that originated from self-harm or resulted from accidents. These are seen as “good” tattoos, exceptions to the rule, and tattoos with a “purpose,” as if tattoos without purpose are therefore always heinous. And that’s not even mentioning the “microbladers” and who tattoo make-up on people’s faces.
I’m glad all of these services exist. I just wish there was less stigma around the act of marking one’s skin, period.
So: miss me with this rhetoric of “but they are ugly” or “they will look bad when you’re older” or “one day you might change your mind.” People make forever-choices with their bodies all the time that we deem “good” that may, in fact, be something they regret later—piercings we abandon and close, cosmetic and elective procedures—the list goes on. Those forever-choices just aren’t always embedded in layers of epidermis; but rather someplace internal, that we can choose to forget about or hide or grow out of if we desire.
What I’m really trying to say is this: what the past few years have reminded me is that my body is so very temporary—and so is its agency, its safety, its youth, and its desires. The malleability and changing of our bodies is the point of living and aging. What if, instead of trying to cling to a youthful, “pure” appearance, I instead embraced a body that I admired on its own merit, one that has survived and has stories to tell? What if, instead of focusing on perfectly “pure” skin, I focused instead on making my skin reflect the values and narratives that have made it what it is, so that if my rights are stripped even further, there will at least be a visual cue that I once had a say in what was done to me?
Yes, my body will age. My tattoos (I have two now!) will fade, change, soften. But my skin was always going to do that, tattoos or no. What a privilege, to have an aging body, one that is not what it was yesterday or a year ago or ten years ago.
When I look at my tattoos, I see a body I choose and that I love. I see stories. I see generosity, I see art, I see life lived. A life I chose, and a body I continue to choose, even when the rest of the world would really rather I didn’t. And when I see the tattoos of others, I see a reminder that we are all more complicated than we appear on the outside, that we live lives so much bigger than what can be conveyed on our skin.
As writer Isaac Fitzgerald says in the preface to the book he created with artist Wendy McNaughton, Pen & Ink: Tattoos & the Stories Around Them:
“A tattoo, whether an ornate full back piece or a scratcher job done in somebody’s living room, is art. A photograph of a tattoo never quite captures it; here, art represents art, art representing stories, stories representing life. Because everyone, tattoos or no, has a story.”