Calling me unbiased on this issue would be on par with calling the Tea Party a collective of learned scholars. I am as biased as a dendrophiliac is pro saving the rainforest. Like most biases, mine is complicated and came before it was consciously invited.
Here’s the scenario: My nearly twenty-year-old sister has gotten her fifth, possibly her sixth tattoo. This one is an entire solar system, possibly ours, but based on the relative size of the gas giants to each other, likely someone else’s. It is on her left, possibly her right, calf. Whether or not there is life on the planet in the goldilocks zone of this solar system is not known. There is a line of poetry written above and beneath the planetary system. It says:
“I will share my constellations with you and learn from yours; we can borrow each others stars.”
I brought up in a family Facebook thread, that Teresa later named “Family Feud,” that Mary had gotten a new tattoo.
I am bad at keeping secrets I do not know are secret.
Mary
They didn’t know that yet.
FYI DAD. I used tip money saved from the past 2 months.
No paychecks went towards it.
Sheesh Luke. Isaac is better at keeping secrets.
Thomasina (Teresa)
Classic Mary.
Bringing up this interrupted the original discussion about the pros and cons of premarital sex and the conversation became about the success and failures of tattoos. My family, it is known, are master debaters.
Because I have no idea how my family feels about my blogging about them, their names, with the exception of Mary, my mother, and Aaron—who definitely doesn’t care about his private views being moderately public—have been changed. (In any case, most of my readers don’t speak English. They come from Russia to look at the pictures).
Jingleheimer, a younger brother, feels this way: “I think at the age of 19 Mary has way too many tattoos.”
I chimed in with, “To each their own. Some people have too many rabbits. Dudes Amsterdam is sick. The coffee shops have more than coffee (; ”
I was quick to double-check my grammar since earlier in the thread someone had already called someone’s lack of punctuation and capitalization out.
The conversation thread dove deep into the nature of choice. As a form we employed the sitcom mode of dialectic discussions. Compared to what everyone is capable, things were kept pretty cordial. Mary pointed out that our dad did not care about the tattoo. Our Dad’s opinion is heavy hitting, reverently cited when it is in support of your position. So if our dad, who feel strongly about many things, was ambivalent about tattoos, was not this strong evidence for the case of not feeling strongly about the tattoo one way or another?
My mom used this as an opportunity to point out something out: Jingleheimer is getting wizened. She said, “[Jingleheimer] is breaking into maturity and thus his vision is clearing. Some take longer than others.”
But Jingleheimer, the boy who used to gyrate in the face of any sort of falling water (dubbed, his Jingleheim shakes), had a point, which right or wrong, had it’s origins in him caring about his little sister, and doing what comes natural in that situation, offering advice.
Mary, because she’s a damn good writer had these closing remarks, “Maybe I’ll regret them, Jake (Jingleheimer). But probably not. Lots I of people don’t. It’s a risk, maybe. But I *know* it will be on me forever. I have tattoos. I like tattoos. I’m thrilled with my tattoos. If at any point in my life that changes (and there are plenty of people that doesn’t change for) I will be happy to tell you so you can tell me “I told you so.”
Whether that day comes or not for Mary, the fate of my opinion is sealed. I am pro tattoo. Three weeks ago Mary chatted to me, “There can be a comma in-between crazy and special. But there needn’t be.” Then she asked me if I would write her a poem that she could choose a portion of it to tattoo to her calf.
She summed it up with: “Write me my tattoo soon. My skin is hungry.”
Jingleheimer could certainly take Mary’s choice of verb “hungry” to make his case. I’m not sure. Before now, I have never had to take a strong stance on tattoos. I don’t recall ever being against any. I’ve been occasionally curious and sometimes intrigued by tattoos before. I have glimpsed the occasional tramp stamp that made me wonder if its owner was still fond of it, but I have never recalled feeling about it with the sort of decided view I have of, say, strep throat or Nazism.
This tattooing by my sister of my poem to her skin, this lasting dermis, caused me to rush to write something that meant something.
There was that question again. What does it mean—to mean something?
Is any query quite so prickly?
A given: Tattoos tell us something about someone else. Mary’s tattoo brought me also to that daring question of what constitutes what we timidly call art. What sketches mean more than scrawling, what tattoos are more than ink?
Like an invaded homeland inspires a war, Mary’s gift, which is what I feel I ought to call it, created something that I choose to see meaning in.
She gave me a definite goal: Write something meaningful. I do not know if it is a good poem or a bad poem, or even what exactly it would mean if it were either. It is a poem and the last two lines will always be apart of my sister’s skin. So without needing to mean more, it means that, and that is certainly something. In the very least, this saves me time, since it means it is, without question, a final draft that I will not be tweaking into some other meaning.
Thank you, Mary.
