Don’t Be a Stranger | Inked

I am a writer. I make up stories. I also have tattoos. Sometimes I like to make up stories about my tattoos.

Put simply — there’s ink everywhere, in many forms.

I have always known I would get tattoos because I wanted art on my body. But also, not only do I dedicate myself to loving things fiercely, I always have to prove my love to them. I own vinyl or merch because I have to prove that I enjoy a particular artist, because even if I never play the record or wear the band shirt, at least I own a tangible form of proof. The same goes for tattoos.

The first tattoo I ever got, I was freshly 18, as most of us were. I lived in Burlington, Vermont. I walked into a tattoo shop on Church Street, which was weirdly also a barber shop, and showed a reference photo to a woman with fourteen piercings. 

When she showed me what she had drawn, I didn’t like it. It didn’t really resemble the reference. But I said I loved it. True to character.

So there it went, needled into the skin of my left wrist, forever. A forget-me-not, about two inches. I was so giddy about finally having a tattoo that I didn’t even really care that it wasn’t what I had envisioned.

The truth is, I don’t know why I picked a forget-me-not. I wanted a flower that could only be blue. This is because, in Mary Oliver’s poem, “Fourth Sign of the Zodiac,” she mentions blue flowers. 

All of my tattoos so far — a hummingbird, an orange and the aforementioned forget-me-not — are, originally, dedicated to her. I mentioned her in my very first article.

Three things about Mary Oliver — she loves flowers, she loves fruit, she loves birds.

When I discovered Mary Oliver and her poetry, I was soothed by her unadulterated and relentless awe of the universe. It made it all less terrifying. I have been anxious since before I could comprehend what a fraction was. I remember one of my first panic attacks when I was 10. I was sitting in my school’s gymnasium, and I felt the walls closing in and gravity about to relinquish its hold on me and my teacher noticed me fidgeting. She handed me her keys to play with, like you would do to pacify a baby. But I think, even inadvertently, I’ve always searched for the same comfort I felt then. I found that comfort laced in Oliver’s words, in her love and appreciation for the world.

I own a vast collection of Oliver’s poetry and essays, including three separate copies of her book “Felicity.” My mother gifted me a hardcover copy of “Devotions” during Christmas when I was 17. It made me tear up, and I held it in my hands as if it had been crafted from gold. Oliver’s words speak to me and wrap me up and make me breathe a little easier.

I enjoyed “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac” at first because of the title, as I am a Cancer, and relatability is the crux of our lives. But once I had read it in full, I was left speechless. Leaving a writer without words is how you know you’ve created a masterpiece. The fourth sign of the zodiac is, in her case, meant literally and not astrologically, as she had been diagnosed with cancer shortly before she wrote it. 

The thing is, I feel less inclined to tell people about the core of all my tattoos, and that she is it. I always feel uncomfortable talking about something that someone else may not know about, as if I sound pretentious, as if I’m boring them. So, sometimes I simply say, “It’s for a poet,” or “It’s for a poem.” And I’m usually right — no one typically inquires beyond that. Maybe it all goes back to how I approved a tattoo I didn’t really like.

But, ultimately, I grew to love my tattoo because of the meaning that I gave it. In the end, I didn’t care what it looked like because of the time in my life that it encapsulates and what it represents to me. I can look down at my flower, or my orange, or my bird and think of Mary Oliver, think of the beautiful constants in the world — the Sun that will wake us up every morning. Maybe we just have to make our own meanings.