Tattoos as a form of self-love

It's nice and okay to enjoy your body!

The terrible thing about stigmas is the way in which they linger in the mind long after they are gone. When I was a kid in the conservative Ohio suburbs, tattoos were intensely stigmatized. They were derided as a sort of vandalism of the body, as something that respectable people didn’t get because respectable bosses wouldn’t hire someone with visible tattoos, as youthful mistakes that would inevitably lead to regret.

By any reasonable measure, this stigma could not be said to still exist except in small conservative pockets: Fully 41% of Millennials have at least one tattoo, Gen Z is already in the 20% range (though many of them have still not come of age), while Gen X, in their middle age, have settled at about a third. Boomers are the least tattooed generation, with a mere 13%.

Though many of my friends have tattoos, and though a furtive part of myself has wanted to get tattoos for a long time, the stigma lingered with me. I couldn’t, I realized, guarantee that I wouldn’t regret a tattoo. So I talked about getting one to anyone who would listen. For years. And just didn’t.

Until a couple weeks ago, when I got my first tattoo at the age of 37.

“a love letter to my body”

For the past few years, I’ve been trying to build a better relationship with my body. My physical health is something that I’ve ranked fairly low in importance for the majority of my life. Even though I left the church in my teenaged years, I’d internalized the Catholic idea that my body was merely a vessel for the soul (or the mind, or consciousness or whatever), and as such, was of limited importance. The Catholics see the body as something that at best is animalistic and profane, a vehicle for the original sin that’s trying to separate you eternally from God.

In my 30s, as I struggled with depression, I began to realize that a lot of what was causing me grief was the fact that, by neglecting my body, I had been hurting my brain (I wrote more on that in the article below).

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I’ve begun to believe that an enormous part of the Christian (and colonial and capitalist and patriarchal) project is convincing people that they can’t trust their bodies, and that they would be better off handing over their autonomy to someone wiser and stronger. That person may be a priest, a ruler, a boss, a parent, or a partner, but regardless, it’s an absolutely devastating thing to do to yourself. And much of our society is built around convincing you that it’s not.

Though I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between our bodies and Christianity/Capitalism/Every Other Form of Domination, I’d never thought about tattoos in this context. Then a couple months back, a friend of mine shared a poem by Fara Tucker on Instagram:

I started collecting ⁣
tattoos long before⁣
I understood that each one ⁣
was a love letter to my body ⁣
a poem and a promise⁣
a persistent prayer⁣
quietly chanting⁣
𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘦⁣
𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘦⁣
𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘦⁣

Midwestern masculinity and the taboo against looking nice

This was the opposite of what I’d been taught about tattoos: my understanding had been that they were a form of peacocking, a way of showing off to others, not so much an act one did for themselves.

Shortly after I read this, my friends Jesse and Cara visited. Jesse grew up in the same hometown as me, and had recently gotten his first tattoo. Cara, who grew up on the East Coast, had two full sleeves and a handful of other tattoos as well.

“I couldn’t stop looking at it after I got it,” Jesse told me. “I told this to a buddy of mine and he said, ‘yeah, we tell ourselves that there are these big meanings behind our tattoos, but at their core, they’re really just an act of vanity.’”

Cara compared it to that impulse, endemic in the Midwestern male, to dress badly and not take care of oneself. “It’s because you guys were told that any sort of personal grooming was at worst gay, and at best was ‘metrosexual.’”

I had first understood just how fucked up this was when I moved to London. Before I went, Jesse, who had been my roommate at the time, had told me, “Hey man, no offense: but they dress nice over there. You need all new clothes.” This sounded like a burden to me, but I found, when I got there, that I liked looking nice all of the time, in part, because it didn’t identify me immediately as an American.

On our school’s campus, you could easily spot the Americans: they were the only ones wearing sweatpants. Everyone else was nicely dressed, no matter how casual the affair.

When I moved back to America and settled on the East Coast, I found that looking nice was less important than it was in Europe, but still more important than it was in the Midwest. As I sunk into depression, I stopped dressing nice. I told myself it was because I didn’t need to show off, but really, I had stopped caring about myself, and was letting my body fall to pieces.

Self-care and the tattoo

My first tattoo is on my forearm. It’s a raven in the style of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics. It has a meaning to me, but that meaning is, frankly, none of your business. And I don’t care (I repeat to myself over and over again, hoping one day it’ll come true) if you like it, because I do, and I stare at it all day long.

My tattoo artist took this right after he finished it — as of this writing, it is not fully healed, so I haven’t really been able to see all of it in weeks.

I have been surprised at the sheer amount of care that goes into getting a tattoo — after getting it, you need to rub Aquafor on it for several days, and then after that, you wash it several times daily, rub lotion on it, and attempt not to pick at it as it scabs and heals into your skin. You skip swimming (as it’s literally an open wound), you keep it out of sun, and you just pamper the little guy.

This is not something I’m used to doing with my body. I regularly forget to moisturize even though dry skin makes me feel like I’m being eaten alive by ants. I regularly forget to put on sunscreen. But as I take care of the new work of art on my body, I am regularly reminded — hey, you can do this with the rest of your body, too.

In the meantime, for the first time, I feel like I own a little bit of myself. I want to care for it and protect it. I want to show it off, even if I somewhat defiantly tell people it’s not for them, it’s for me. It is, perhaps, a little bit of vanity, a little bit of pride. But the Avett Brother’s song “The Perfect Space” has this lovely line:

I wanna have pride
Like my mama has
And not like the kind in the Bible
That turns you bad

I’m old enough now to know that the Bible was wrong about a lot of stuff that turns you bad. And I’ve done enough hating myself to have earned, I think, a little bit of vanity, a little bit of pride. My body is mine, and mine alone, after all.