My Tattoos Are More Than Art

They’re a roadmap of my life

The first tattoo I got was cheap. Very, very cheap. Shortly after my high school graduation, and about six months after my 18th birthday, my dad walked into my room and threw a $50 bill on my bed. “Go get your tattoo,” he’d said. “No skulls, no knives.” I lit out of my room to call my best friend Lisa, whose mother had let her get a tattoo before we were of age. Lisa was now sporting a purple rose (her favorite color) with light turquoise bubbles tattooed on the lower left side of her belly. I thought it was beautiful and wanted to get inked, too, so I’d started drawing on myself. I drew flowers mostly—often a sharp petaled one on the inside of my left ankle. I guess my father was fed up with it and thought maybe the pain of a real tattoo would deter me. For a little while it did.

Lisa picked me up in the little stick shift Mazda her mother had customized for her our senior year. It was smoky grey with a thin purple pinstripe circling the body. We sped toward the edge of town to the man who’d done her tattoo with my $50 burning a hole in my pocket. The makeshift studio was dim like a basement and the man setting up the inks and tattoo gun looked as I expected—older with a big beard and a heavy metal band muscle tee. He told me color didn’t work on Black skin so I wouldn’t be able to get something vibrant like Lisa. But if I was insistent I had a choice that might work. Orange.

I picked a piece of flash art from the wall. It was a series of three nondescript flowers on a vine that I wanted it on my right ankle. I took my seat in the chair with my leg extended out toward his chest and closed my eyes. The first dip of the needle into my skin was like fire. I balled my fists together to still my body, afraid to jerk or move or end up with scattered lines. I made it through one flower before I tapped out in tears and sweat. I don’t know what I expected it to feel like, but it certainly wasn’t someone carving into my skin. He cleaned up the wonky orange flower, wrapped my ankle in Saran Wrap, and sent me on my way with no care instructions or ointment.

Then Lisa and I headed to McDonald’s to debrief and chatter over the newest addition to my body. That tattoo and two supersized value meals fit into my $50 budget cleanly. It was a cheap tattoo, remember? But I was proud. It was the first time I felt fully in control of my body. I was always well cared for growing up. I had a standing hair appointment, an abundance of clothes, shoes, and jewelry, and I was almost always neat and well put together. That was at the hand of my mother and the direction of my father. But this? This was my own thing even if it was financed by my dad. A couple of months later, when I arrived on the campus of Kent State University, I cut off my hair. By the end of my freshman year, I had two more tattoos and a tragus piercing.

Across social media young people have begun to post about customizing their avatars. The videos show new hairstyles, tattoos, piercings, and more. I’m proud of them for putting a name to this personalization so early on in their lives. I grew up being told tattoos would stop me from getting a good job, tongue piercings were for nasty girls, and natural hair wasn’t professional. I lived worrying about these ideas for far too long. The tattoos kept coming, though. I tattooed my wrists to stop myself from sinking into corporate oblivion but have now spent nearly two decades working for the largest corporation in the world, the United States government.

Almost 30 years after my first tattoo I’ve added 15 more. Most are small, but all of them mark a chapter I needed or wanted to memorialize for a lifetime. Some of the tattoos are dumb and there is no deep meaning behind them (the fairy sitting on a crescent moon on my left thigh and my own name in cursive under that orange flower). I got them because my college friends and I descended on a tattoo shop in Kent, Ohio and all of us (but maybe not Chris) got tatted or pierced. It was bonding and a bunch of kids exercising their freedom.

College changed me. I went from a homesick girl to a crew of friends I still have 30 years later. The tattoos are dumb, but they matter. They matter because those first three trips under the needle marked my adulthood. I starved and worked and studied and lived under my own hand. There was a lot of failure, and a few years misshapen like the first tattoo, but I picked it all on my own and lived with the decisions and maybe a little bit of regret.

Other tattoos are heartbreak and healing. My wedding date in a stylized fashion is inked into my front right shoulder. If anyone asks what X30X means I have to reopen the wound. I have to tell them that on 10/30/2010 I thought I was starting my forever. Or maybe I don’t have to tell them anything. I’ve thought about covering it. I don’t think I will. It’s heartbreak but it’s part of my story just like the horrible orange flower.

On the inside of my left wrist is part of the healing. It’s a single word tucked beneath the ankh I got tattooed sometime in my twenties. It says libertad. It’s the final word of the OutKast song “Liberation.” Freedom. That heartbreak had crushed me, broken me in ways I wasn’t sure I had the tools to fix. I listened to the song on repeat for hours and hours one day that bled into night. I cried and cried until I was empty. Then I got up, drove to a tattoo shop on Main Street in my hometown, and got the word and the feeling etched into my skin. It’s crooked when my arm isn’t extended, but my healing has been crooked, too.

I’ve spent the last 30 years collecting milestones in my skin. In typewriter font on my nape is inked “poet,” a gift to myself when I earned my MFA. My life’s motto, il buon tempo verra (the good time shall come), circles my right wrist. A pen, a paper airplane, the goddess Athena, an owl, 11:11, and three Adinkra symbols at the base of my neck round out the 16 pieces of memories I carry with me daily. One of those Andinkra symbols is a sankofa bird. “Go back and get it” is a rough translation of its meaning. You can always reach back for something in your past to help you in the present is the idea. The tattoo is solid black, a little larger than a quarter, and it hurt. The vibration of the tattoo gun sent shivers down my spine as the artist worked, but the pain was worth it. I can’t reach back for some greater meaning from when I got the tattoo, but I can reach back now and see what I needed was sitting just below the surface alongside the ink. I can look back at the tattoo, and the other 15, and see the path of my life. The joy and heartbreak, but most importantly the freedom to decide my final form.

There are more tattoos in my future (the next two have already been decided) and they have meaning from the onset. This doesn’t make them more important than the others, though. They’re just another part of my evolution, another way to express the version of myself I think is most closely aligned to the woman I want to be. The tattoos in the last few years of my life, deep into my forties, have been both aspirational and reminders. They remind me that I have survived rock bottom. Remind me of the omnipotent love that exists in my life. Remind me that I’m living so many of my dreams. They remind me of whimsy and the course corrections it took to get to this exact moment. They remind me that life is a series of choices that can lead to scars and beauty marks of many kinds and it’s up to you to decide how to best carry them with you.

Athena Dixon is the author of essay collections The Incredible Shrinking Woman and The Loneliness Files and her work appears in publications such as Harper’s Bazaar, Shenandoah, Grub Street, Narratively, and Lit Hub among others. She is a Consulting Editor for Fourth Genre and the Nonfiction/Hybrid Editor for Split/Lip Press.