It was cloudy and mosaicked before I had it reworked four months later when I sat for my second tattoo. The waistline of my jeans wore it off over the course of a two-week hiking trip that I embarked on just after getting the tattoo. It was over before I understood the pain. She talked the artist down to inking me with something no bigger than a quarter. My mother accompanied me because I was under eighteen, and she was trying, with her first and most willful child, to be cool. There were no dog tags in the Civil War, and despite a six-year program undertaken in 1865 by the Quartermaster General to locate and inter the dead, only half of the war’s fatalities were identified. Martin Hildebrandt, a tattoo artist from New York City, enlisted in the Army of the Potomac and was known to ink men so that their bodies might be identified. Whitman might have seen tattoos in the hospital wards on the limbs of those dying boys that he tended with letters and words and ice cream. The first I graft and increase upon myself –the latter I translate into a new tongue. The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of hell are with me, See me naked, or moving through the water swimming in clear lakes, see me in a sundress or walking the trash to the curb, see me stretching my muscles toward the sun, see me showering off the sweat of the day, and see my arms and legs illustrated, my back and foot patterned, my hipbone stamped with pigment, my shoulder opening wings of ink. It isn’t a large hide, not quite twenty square feet, and beyond the scratches and scrapes of childhood it has escaped real damage, enduring only moderate acne during adolescence and again during a rough spot in my late twenties.īut I am inscribed with images, electric with ink. My skin, if I consider it, is not particularly special.
Like most kids who grow up in the country, I was checked with scars on my arms and legs from bike accidents, barbed wire, the blade of the pocketknife I had stolen from my father, a fishhook, a mean pine bough, the barbs of blackberry and raspberry bushes. But that ink scrubbed away or smeared off on my cheek in the night. In school I doodled on my hands and arms, writing notes that blossomed into flowers and vines.
#Bone needle green hell skin#
I drew on all things, so it seems likely that my skin was also my canvas. I am certain that I began drawing on myself early. With the inked mummies of the Euro-Asian steppe, or the bodies of the Iceman and an Egyptian priestess, what did their dots and dashes and their swirling chimerical animals mean to their owners? Perhaps only that they had names, even in death. Anchors, pirate queens, bleeding hearts all offered something like an ID card. Salt and water do horrible things to a body, erasing all personality, removing eyes, wiping faces clean, but even stretched and water-logged, a tattoo remains locked in flesh. Sailors hoped their ink would identify their bodies if they drowned at sea. Tattoos are often the language of the dead because skin can speak for us when we are gone. It looks like snake and bird feather, scale and leather. Skin covered in ink doesn’t much resemble our naked dead layers. The average adult lives within twenty square feet of skin, roughly the size of a large baby blanket, although shaped, of course, not like a blanket but like a human.
There are marks that fate applies to our bodies, freckles, moles, and scars from falls, mean house cats, sharp kitchen knives, and slippery rocks in the water holes where we learned to swim, and then there are marks we etch into our skin deliberately, razor bites, piercings, tattoos. It is in the dermis that tattoo ink is deposited and where, as the years of a life progress, the ink sinks like heavy water, fading away through layers of skin like a figure retreating into shadow. Scratch your epidermis and you might flake off a few dead cells, but cut into your dermis and you’ll bleed and slap your hand to the cut in pain. The strata of our skin resemble a slice of the earth, where twenty-five to thirty layers of skin cells separate us from the outside world. A skin cell lives for a fortnight and is then pressed upward through the process of desquamation to flake off and float around your house as dust. The outer layer, the epidermis, lacks blood vessels and survives on oxygen alone, although it needs very little of it because many of its cells are already dead. Skin is our barrier against the world, enveloping our body so that we won’t lose our precious water and evaporate like dew. To consider my tattoos we must first consider skin.
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