#16 I Wish I Asked About Your Tattoo Earlier
We lived together for six months and I found your demeanor friendly and distant, your speaking English a little choppy. Perhaps it’s that low voice with and dry accent in English that contrasts with the fluid Spanish I hear you dancing in conversation with your partner. Something somehow made me believe that you and I were not connecting like I could connect with her. You are both psychologists, and her expressiveness made her empathy more obvious, a skill that outshined her English technique.
This morning, on your last day here, I asked you about your tattoo, one of your tattoos. The one possibly centered around your heart on the left side of your chest. A jagged ring array of irregular hexagons tampering inward, outlined in black and thicker on the outside, frames a scene — an anatomical human heart outlined more lightly in black overlayed onto a galactic sky background– impressively blended shades of black, navy, and light blue with unshaded spaces resembling a twinkling star. In the part of the night sky within the anatomical heart shape, there’s a goldenrod yellow, thick zigzag and an unpainted keyhole. Four thick blood vessels protrude from the top of the heart, oriented upward then curving in different directions, each one shaded on one side with light blue ink as if to show perspective in lighting, lighting on a human heart.
You told me that this tattoo is about having to open your heart, show what is inside, and be vulnerable to be strong. We are often covering what is really there, to protect ourselves and to function. No, you say, not in words but in meaning. To you, we cannot live like that. The jagged outline of this piece of body art resembles an open wound, one that could continue to open, indicated by the pointed hexagons collectively pointed torward center, in action, piercing you deeper, hence the red ink shading by the inner edges of the hexagon, redness that draws you into the galactic scene with the keyhole framed by the anatomic heart. Showing what is inside, you say, and you become more naked than naked.
You say it sitting there on my couch, exposing your philosophy fluidly and without reservation, pausing naturally, never awkwardly.
When did you decide to do this? I asked.
Four years ago, you say. Then you were 21 years old. What is it that led you to the insight that those of us twice your age and three times your age miss?
You share that you took your time to decide on the design, and when you did get inked, you did it in one eight hour sitting, the time needed for the artist to shade and fade the layers of colors for night sky, perspective on blood vessels, and an opening wound.
Then I asked you about the tattoo next to that one, one that wraps around your left shoulder, mostly in black outlines. There’s a lightbulb partly capped with matter shaped and textured like cerebral matter, a two flight set of stairs to its left — the first flight ascends toward your left to a platform that then takes a hairpin turn before the second flight ascends to your right and up the brain. A red circle intercepts the platform. Above and to the left are some geometrically arranged lines framing rhomboids and below is a rectangular blank defined by the absence of the thin swift texturing around it. Words in cursive script sit in the middle of this blank and I recall neither what they were nor what they meant.
You describe this tattoo — one that took only 4 hours to receive — as being about the mental world. Ideas, thinking, and according to you, the stairs symbolize evolution. The sun at the mid-way platform symbolizes a setting sun, something ending. One direction ends at the platform and we must accept its end before we can evolve and ascend in the direction available to us, often opposite of the one in which we were heading.
Today I learned what was always there that I couldn’t see or hear until I looked at and understood what you have chosen to wear on your body for life.
Now you are on a plane with your partner to vacation in a nearby country before returning to your home country, and I sit here contemplating a world outlook drawn on your chest.
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This is the assignment for Day 16 of Don’t Break the Chain, a writing course by master copywriter Cole Schafer.
The prompt: Have a conversation with somebody, anybody, and make them feel like the most important person in the world. Then, write something I learned about them that I didn’t know before.
