Tag: symbolism

I have never liked the word tattoo.

It sounds like an object. Something applied. Something chosen from a book and placed on the body, the way a picture is hung on a wall.

But the color is not hanging there.

It entered through a wound.

A needle broke the surface again and again, carrying pigment into the living layers beneath it. There was blood. Heat. Swelling. Then the tightening of a scab.

The body did what it has always done.

It healed.

The wound disappeared.

The color did not.

What do you call it after it heals?

When the bleeding ended?

When the scab fell away?

When new skin formed over it?

Or eleven years later, when I could no longer remember my arms without color?

There are figures beneath my skin whose faces dissolve into color.

I no longer know how to answer for them.

Not because there isn’t a story.

Because there isn’t only one.

Memory does not preserve a face forever. It keeps stranger things: the angle of someone’s shoulders, the distance between two people, the feeling that someone once stood close enough to change your life.

Then, one day, it reaches the face and spills.

Color remembers what detail cannot.

These images may outlive my face.

Perhaps that is why the people beneath my skin have no faces either. They exist the way memory exists: recognizable, but never entirely recoverable.

Perhaps the word has always bothered me because it continues to name the wound long after the wound has disappeared.

There should be another word.