“I think that tattoos are about celebrating your body now. I know they aren’t going to look good when I’m older. Just think, someday we’ll have kids and be these moms with tattoos.” I was surprised to hear her talk like this. I didn’t think she wanted to have kids. One time in college she had said that if she ever got pregnant she would have the baby, but then she’d eat it. She was joking, of course. Half joking at least. Her tattoos were lovely. One of her tattoos was a Chinese fan on her back. That was her first one and I was with her when she got it. During college, she had been pretty conservative in appearance. She had chin length hair and didn’t wear a lot of make up or flashy clothes. This tattoo signified the changes that were to come.
It was the weekend before she was going to leave for Portland and she drove up from Charleston to visit me in Chicago before she left. She said she wanted to get a tattoo, but did not know exactly what she wanted. The one idea she had was a Chinese fan. We went to a tattoo parlor a few blocks away from my apartment and looked through the flash books. I was the one who found it. What I found was actually a kabuki opera character. She was a stylized woman in a kimono holding a fan. The tattoo artist made an enlarged copy of the picture. The fan was perfect. Susana managed to get it done for only $60.00. She had a strange power over men. When he asked her which colors she wanted she said he could pick whatever he thought would look good. It was beautiful. The fan had a solid black outline and was filled in with brilliant shades of orange, yellow and turquoise. She was unusually pale for a Latin woman and the colors were brilliant on her skin. That night I helped her clean it off. It was still a little bloody. She wore a low cut tank top and went out without the bandage.
She said she liked the symbolism it had. A fan was traditionally something women hid behind – a sign of modesty, but she wore the fan as a sign of immodesty. She would become less and less modest over the years. Was she transforming into something different or just peeling off the layers of dust and grime that had gradually covered her true self?
We had always been good girls. We had always been small and quiet. We did not take up too much space with our bodies or voices. We were entirely comfortable hurting ourselves but had not yet learned how to gracefully inflict pain on others. We had been warned about doing things we might regret - things that might permanently mark us and now we were realizing that all those warnings were bullshit.
Susana once told me that when she was in high school she ate nothing but cereal for a year and then walked six miles a day, focusing on how she could burn off the cereal calories. It seemed that adding something to her body was a sign that she had come a long way. She no longer wished for parts of herself to disappear.
No comments:
Post a Comment