back to basics

I sat on the edge of a bed in his apartment struggling to explain to my tattoo artist why I didn’t think I was going to get any more when my girl friend intervened with a simple observation. Basically Calla’s turning into a middle aged woman in Phoenix. While this is a truthful enough explanation–I’m gonna turn 30 next year–it doesn’t feel like the whole truth or like nothing but the truth. It may very well be true, but that doesn’t make it the only truth. It may be the least complicated truth to understand, and yet there is always a truth already deeper.

I suppose the burgeoning shift in tattoo attitude can be dated to the moment I realized the irony emblazoned on my upper right arm. To symbolize desertion of an isolationist attitude (as well as the deconstruction of institutionalized patriarchy), I have a battle axe inked above my elbow. A couple months ago I found myself laughing out loud at the commentary I have for it. A *battle axe* representing full female empowerment within a community of sisterhood, and not the defensiveness or offensiveness anyone not intimately familiar with Buffy the Vampire Slayer is bound to see. Despite the irony I saw in this (and in the We don’t want our believes permanently in place as a definitive statement on belief), I still expected to get more tattoos.

Until about a month ago when nothing to prove became my only mantra and I realized my tattoos have always been about pretending in the tangible where there wasn’t any. Take my left ring finger, for example. A broken peace sign having originating as a Greek lambda rests above my knuckle. I got the lambda done because of some puppy dog eyes in her face and an insecurity in my heart. Less than a month after that didn’t work out, a friend attempted a cover-up and we both learned finger tattooing is not for the faint of heart and should be left to the professionals. I justified the fresh ink all but falling out by proclaiming I can’t hide from my past. And as true an idiom as this may be, I don’t need every single observant cashier asking what’s up with my finger for the rest of my life.

Struggling with this concept of proving myself while I was in New York, I decided against the tattoos I had previously decided on. But it wasn’t until actually taking in that one Lil Wayne album cover the other day that I understood the depth of my decision. If the art team of Tha Carter III had provocation in mind, it worked on me one time recently. I was not offended at the image of an inked baby, I was offended by my own arrogance. To think that spiritually I am something other than a child who can barely begin to know whats good. To think that everything of this earth is temporal, but in my vanity I try’n ice it into permanence. To think that I am made of, in, for, and by an Uncreated Love but this product could use decorative improvement. I can’t with myself sometimes. Today, I have 11 tattoos and the number can only go down from here.

Saturday I will start the year-long expensive process of getting this little fellow zapped off. I have been trying to make peace with it since before the cover-up fail, before the break-up, and before it was even inked. And it’s time to realize I’m not meant to make peace with it. I’m not meant to have it. And while I wouldn’t miss a good 9 out of my 11 tattoos at this point, the time and cost of tattoo removal is prohibitive and the little number on the very finger I’d still let someone else claim with a ring one day is the only one I *have* to see fade.

Lately, I wear less make-up. I’ve actively decided to have polished nails only on weekends. Perhaps the explanation is just that I am now, more likely than not, in my middle years. But it feels like this has all to do with me letting myself glow for the first time. And maybe that’s all middle age is, a time where I can learn to love myself absent condition and just as g-d made me.