Getting My First Tattoo

and other thoughts on permanent decisions and how we choose to live in our bodies

A couple of weeks ago, I got my first tattoo. It was somehow both a complete out of body experience and the most physically centered I have ever felt in my life. (Don’t ask me to explain that. As a therapist once told me, two things can be true at once).

Probably two or three years ago my sister and I first gave life to the idea of getting a matching tattoo. I don’t remember how it even first came up, but my sister is my very best friend, so it felt like a no-brainer.

I had always loved the idea of getting a tattoo, putting some art on my body for all of perpetuity, some representation of what I liked, or cared about, or even just thought was cool. And that’s what I love even more about the idea of getting a matching one. It says that there is something I love enough to put on my body and someone I love enough to share it with.

So, we had this notion. An inkling, a grand idea. But I was particularly adverse to googling “matching sister tattoos,” and I had unwavering confidence that, when the right thing came around, we would know. And then it did. Unfortunately it just took my parents selling our childhood house.

The first time they sat us down and told us their plan, I knew almost instantly. It was gonna suck, emotionally, but god wouldn’t I come out of it with the best tattoo of all time.

It was the place I shared with my sister for her whole life, for nineteen years, where we watched each other grow up. Where we outgrew the brief phase of her hating me. Where we spent an entire Christmas day snowed in, sledding on the tiny drainage slope next to our house, which felt perfectly steep enough when we were kids. Where we had our birthday parties, played in the yard with a garden hose and a sprinkler attachment (we never really did need that pool we always talked about), and where she cut her bangs with safety scissors hiding behind the old rocking chair. Where we spent Christmas Eves surrounded by family, nervously awaiting Santa Claus and trying to angle ourselves so we could see up the chimney and wonder how a person could possibly fit through there. It was the house that raised me. And the house that welcomed me home years later when I was beaten down and needing home more than ever.

And so, as the impending closing date approached, we booked our appointment. Almost without thinking about it too much. Like I said, it was a no-brainer. The gravity of it didn’t hit me until I was sitting in the waiting room, trying to distract myself by looking at all of the carefully curated quirky decor that you would expect out of a tattoo shop, and consequently getting so pale that my mom had to ask if everything was okay.

I’ve always been a rule follower. A doing-things-by-the-book person. I will check and double check and triple check the instructions on a boxed mac and cheese when I make it. And tattoos feel almost against the rules, even if they’re not. So, that was part of it. But mostly I just knew this was a lifetime decision. I was seeing myself at sixty, arms sagging and skin full of wrinkles from hours spent in the sun. Even then, it would still be there. At thirty five for an important job interview, at twenty something at a wedding dress fitting (hopefully that’s in the cards for me), at forty five explaining to future kids that that’s where I once used to live.

I have to admit I have spent a substantial fraction of every shower that I have taken since staring at it intensely, incredulously, trying to remember what the bare skin that was there before looked like and washing it with soap and watching the bubbles fade away while, miraculously, the lines stay.

We don’t often deal in absolutes. We deal in in-betweens, in gray areas, in almosts, in maybes. But this was certain and permanent. Which is… scary. But I kept hearing a line from Eliza Mclamb’s Lena Grove playing on repeat in my head. “Got a big tattoo in Colorado Springs / jumped straight in the river just to feel the sting / of a permanent decision on my fleeting physical body.” It was a permanent decision, but my physical body is fleeting. That reminder brought me comfort. It would add to the collection of other permanent marks and signs I had accumulated on my body over the years, just from living in it. Just the same as the scar on my left knee from falling off my bike on the sidewalk in front of my grandma’s house. Sticking around forever.

And for fairness to my story I have detailed my fears and nerves, but I must also detail this - I love it. It is one of the best decisions I have ever made and it is everything that I wanted it to be.

I must note, on the most simple level, how absolutely beautiful it is! It is everything I dreamed of and the most perfect moment, trapped in time on my skin. And now I will carry it and all of its memories with me forever.

In the weeks and days since, reflecting, I realized something else that made me love it even more. This is the first physical change that I have made to my body that was entirely and wholly for me.

Yes, I’d made changes before, for better or for worse. At 20, I chopped off all my hair when I realized my first ever real relationship was failing. At 21, I pierced my ears, hoping if I could put in double gold hoop earrings like the other girls, I would feel better. At 22, I gained the weight back that I had unintentionally starved off myself from months of anxiety induced lack of hunger.

But these changes weren’t made with the same autonomy I have now.

Now, at 23, I got my first tattoo, capturing the essence of the place that raised me on the skin of my right arm. And just because I wanted to. Not because I was outrunning something, not because I needed to try something to feel anything, not because I wanted someone else to change the way they perceived me. I didn’t consider anyone else in my decision. It was for me. (And my sister, of course).

As women, we are taught from a very young age how to maintain appearances. We are taught the standards of how to primp and preen ourselves and blow out our hair and have the perfect shave and never let our nails get chipped and pluck our own eyebrows and choose the right retinol night creams by the age of 24. There is some abstract ideal of the perfect woman that we are always reaching for, but it will never do more than grace our fingertips, no matter how hard we try.

And when I opened up the reels tab on my Instagram (hellscape), I was reminded of this invisible yet inescapable force that permeates our lives. It was a video of an objectively very beautiful woman, where the topic was not her body, or even her clothes, or any physical trait, really. Yet, I opened up the comments, and one of the first ones that I saw read, “Would be a ten if it weren’t for all of those god awful tattoos.” (The tattoos were not awful. They actually looked quite a lot like mine). And in that moment, though the comment was objectively vile, I almost felt freed. Because you know what? I had never even considered that.

I had never considered that men might hate it or use its presence to deem me unworthy or “not hot anymore”. I hadn’t considered anyone else in that decision. It was something I wanted, so I did it. I had done this entirely for me. And, though I didn’t even realize it at the time, that in and of itself was an act of radical resistance.

Every day we choose how we wish to inhabit our bodies. Our physically fleeting bodies. And I’m so happy (and proud) that I made a choice that I love on how I want to express myself through that. Our bodies are just vessels at the end of the day, but isn’t it lovely to be able to use them to express who we are and how we feel on the inside.

This choice makes me feel more aligned physically with how I feel on the inside. I am exactly the type of person to have a sentimental tattoo in memory of their childhood home. And I will happily explain that to every person who asks (or even every person who doesn’t).

Permanent changes are less scary now (both in losing the house and in getting this tattoo). And I feel empowered to live in my body in a way that makes me happy. Maybe those are the two main goals of getting inked - confronting your comfort with permanence and confronting your presence in your physical body. Or maybe they’re just for fun. We can circle back whenever I get another.

xoxo