Sunday, December 13, 2009

#21: The story behind my tattoo


“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father… So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” Matthew 10:29-31

I’ve always liked the idea of having a tattoo. Beautiful embellishments on what God has created; man’s way of etching a little bit of what’s inside on the outside. What has kept me from getting a tattoo for all these years has not been the fear of pain, fear of needles, fear of what my parents may say; rather it has been the fear of my own torturous indecision. It seems every three or four years I feel the need to totally reinvent myself: new job, new home, new circle of friends, etc. With this history of change, who’s to say that what I feel on the inside now will still be true in ten, twenty, thirty years? I always told myself that when I found a design that I could live with for the rest of my life, then I would get a tattoo. As I set out making my list of things to do in 2009, I realized that, like many things on this list, if I just waited for a design to come to me I would probably be waiting forever. So I decided to just do it, and pray that it would all come together by the time the date rolled around.

I started my search for my first tattoo design by making a list of words and images that have had meaning in my life over the years. The first two images that came to mind were birds and flowers. Here’s why:

A few years ago, I found myself starting over in life. The path that I had been on had come to an abrupt stop and I found myself unmarried, unemployed, and living alone in a house that used to belong to my great-grandparents. I had moved there so that I could live rent-free while figuring out what I wanted to do next. The house had this great screened-in porch on one side. Every morning, I would sit out on the porch with a cup of coffee and my journal and just write. I journaled about my sense of loss, my failures and disappointments, about the dreams that I had watched die along my journeys. I also spent a lot of time just sitting. I would watch the sun rise, drinking in the stillness of the early morning air, embracing the peace that is so powerful during those hours. As I sat, I began to notice the little details of my new surroundings. Mainly I noticed an oddly high number of birds that seemed to call my yard home. Red birds, blue birds, little birds, big birds, they all fed off the trees and bushes around the porch. I watched how they flew from branch to branch, sitting, singing, eating. I could see them up close, the brightness of their feathers, the sleek lines of their beaks and wings. It was amazing to me that I had never noticed how magnificent of a creation birds were! They are everywhere, yet how often are we really still enough to take in how beautiful they are? One day I realized that I was spending more time watching the birds than I was writing. Then I realized that I was better off for it. Don’t get me wrong, the journaling was good for me, I needed to get all that stuff out of my head. But what I really needed was a break from the madness. I needed to sit and take notice of the beauty that surrounded my life and not just dwell on the crazy that lived in my head. We live everyday in a magical creation, but how often do we really see it? I needed to learn to trust that a force greater than myself was working in my life and that it was not my job to plan my days, it was just my job to enjoy them.

There was another lesson that I learned during this time as well. As I mentioned, the house I had moved into was my great-grandmother’s. She was a gardener, one of those little old ladies whose goal was to have the prettiest yard on the block. She had spent hours laboring in the yard planting roses, lilies, azaleas, you name it. She had passed away about thirteen years prior to my moving in, during which time the house had been a rental property. The most recent tenants prior to my arrival, the Meth-Heads as I called them, had done little to take care of the house and even less the yards. The flowerbeds were overgrown, the shrubs uncut, the rose bushes left to grow wild. Since it was still early spring when I moved in, we decided to just cut everything down and see what came back. What happened was amazing. Through the rambles of years unkempt sprouted beautiful flowers, the likes of which I had never seen before. Everyday was something new, tulips, roses, and lilies all around. The most magnificent were the azaleas. Lining the front porch like a barrier to the outside world, the bushes bloomed bright pink and white. I would cut bunches every day to fill bottles and jars placed throughout my home. One day I realized the powerful message these blossoms had for me. For years they were neglected, ignored, starved, yet still they could produce beauty. Whereas I had spent years toiling and striving with nothing to show for it, I suddenly had a home filled with beauty that had required no toil. I saw this as a message of hope. Hope that God didn’t need my efforts to make something beautiful out of my life. Not that I was off the hook completely, just that He could take up the slack where I fell short, which seemed to be in a lot of places. That spring, those pink blooms became the symbol of a promise that there would always be beauty in my life no matter how bad I screw it all up, because God’s power is not contingent on me and my actions.

There it is, flowers and birds. It was these truths, these images, that gave me the strength to move on, to start over, to find a new path for the next journey in my life; therefore, a logical choice for a meaningful tattoo. So that’s where I started in my design search. I found a bird, found a guy, and had him draw it on my back. I won’t go into the details because this story is long enough already, but let’s just say that the only time I cried during the entire process was when I looked at the finished product for the first time. It was absolutely perfect. This artist who I didn’t know and had selected based on his watercolor rendition of a machine gun that he was working on when I came into the shop to set up the appointment had put into imagery stories that existed only in my mind. I can’t really explain it, but when I saw what he had drawn, the picture spoke to me of trust and hope. Flowers and birds.

I love my tattoo and I love what it stands for in my life. Here’s the problem though… I don’t believe it. Sure, from time to time my attitude is one that can embrace hope, that can accept that the beauty that surrounds me is enough to sustain me. But most of the time I am still that scared, broken girl who sat on the porch and wept over her losses. Sometimes I am so full of anger and bitterness over the hands I have been dealt in life that birds and flowers are the last things I could give a damn about. Other times, the crippling chill of loneliness makes me loose all hope that spring will ever come again in my life. It is the lack of control that characterizes both hope and trust that I just cannot seem to accept.

One night, a few weeks after I was “branded”, I found myself in this place of sadness yet again. As I walked past a mirror in my bedroom, I caught a glimpse of my back and immediately felt regret. What was I thinking getting something so hopeful permanently emblazoned on my shoulder? If I wanted an image that conveyed my temperament, a black hole or an empty bowl would have been better suited. But it was too late, I was stuck with this symbol of hope forever reminding me of a peaceful life I wanted but would probably never find.

I love my tattoo. Most tattoos (ones gotten while sober at least) are a symbol of where a person was at a point in their life. These markings can tell a story of who we were, what we liked, who we loved. Through no device of my own, I wound up with a picture of a promise that I have never truly lived and of a place that I may never know, yet I do know that as long as I live, I’ll never stop dreaming of it. Rather than finding a symbol that I would believe in for the rest of my days, I chose one that most days I deep down cannot believe in. But one thing that both promises and tattoos have in common is that they live outside of us and outside of our sense of time. Flowers and birds. Trust and hope. If I have to live with something everyday for the rest of my life, I can think of nothing better than this promise, a truth that I know I will want to believe in as long as I live. And that, in itself, gives me hope.

“Consider how the lilies grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, how much more will he clothe you, O you of little faith!” Luke 12:27-28


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