Last summer I got a tattoo on my forearm. It was a frame from a Chris Ware graphic novel showing a nervous man cringing in shock from the noise of a telephone, represented by the word “RING” in huge red script. It was the first of my tattoos to involve any colour, the rest all being black line-drawings. When I woke the morning after I looked down and saw, rather than the familiar image, a nightmarish, enormous smudge of angry red that covered 8in of my arm.
In my half-asleep state this sight put the fear of God into me and I leapt out of bed, mind racing. For a minute or so, before I could unravel the bandage and investigate the area properly, I believed that something had gone terribly wrong and I was now to have an entirely red forearm for the rest of my life. I did panic, admittedly, but then something surprising happened – I rapidly reconciled myself to this new life I was to lead with a red arm. I even managed to laugh. It wasn’t that I would enjoy looking at the hideous mess, but rather that I thought I would easily come to enjoy its presence in my life, even though it was a mistake. Why? Because it would have been my mistake, something that happened to me and only me. It would have been a part of my one, unreproducible life.
Soon I managed to clean myself properly, carefully removing the layers of co-mingling sweated-off red ink and blood that had become trapped and spread beneath my bandage. I was relieved to be looking at this image I love so much, beautifully rendered. And yet to the Melanie Phillipses of this world, that image would be just as repellent to look at as my insane red hellscape tattoo. Phillips revealed in a column last week that the sight of tattoos makes her feel physically ill. She feels that the contemporary normalisation of the tattoo – an intervention once reserved in our culture for sailors, carnival folk and criminals – reveals a crisis going on in secular society. Phillips has attracted plenty of mockery for her take, but it’s a familiar, if hysterically expressed, opinion. Plenty of people, young and old, have expressed prurient disapproval of my tattoos. Usually they are either annoyed that I don’t have some wonderfully meaningful reason for each of them or they ask if I’ll regret it on my wedding day.
Admittedly, I have not done much to avoid these criticisms, given my array of dazzlingly pointless tattoos. I have 13 of them now, and rather than an aesthetic grand plan, they form a haphazard collection of unrelated, impulsive doodles. Personally I like the casual vibe the whole nutty array gives off, perhaps because in a way I actually agree completely with Melanie Phillips: my tattoos are a kind of undermining of the sanctity of my body. It’s just that we have exactly diverging perspectives on the nature of this nihilistic desecration.
For years my body was a site of constant and violent conflict. When I wasn’t hurting, starving, or loathing it, I was in a fugue state of denial that it had nothing to do with “me” – whatever “me” was. It was just some abstracted mistake to cope with. Yet it mattered to me enormously, as did its aesthetic pristineness – the very quality I would eventually come to violate with my tattoos.
I am anecdotally aware of many people who have purposefully used tattoos as a way to reclaim their traumatised bodies, choosing the locations of their scars or areas of the body they once particularly hated. It was far less intentional than this for me, but in the eight years since I started getting tattoos I have repaired my relationship with my body. I don’t jump for joy at the sight of myself naked, but nor do I feel any resentment or ill will toward it.
I enjoy the things my body does for me. I thank it for withstanding its years in the wilderness of my neglect and cruelty, for persisting so I can now run without stopping in shame over my ineptitude, and have sex without second-guessing how I am being viewed, and view a new foreign place in terms of how much I will enjoy to traversing it all on foot. I know how lucky I am to be able to do these things and how lucky I am to finally feel gratitude for them.
I also know how fleeting these abilities of mine are. Indeed, this is part of why I am able to value them. Even in a healthy, lucky, long life, we start out dependent on others and eventually die that way too. No matter what our physical capabilities, or our level of fitness or beauty, the years in which we enjoy our bodies at their peak condition are always going to be vanishingly, harrowingly few in the grand scheme of things.
For me, my silly, ill-considered, multiple tattoos are one way to acknowledge this tragi-comic reality – that, unbelievable as it may seem, this body, which is often submerged in pleasure and activity, is also marching me towards death. It’s absurd, it’s unbearable, it’s an irresolvable agony that is best addressed by a £50 permanent doodle of a pissed Mickey Mouse waving a bottle of hooch, which will eventually join me in the grave.
Megan Nolan is an Irish writer based in London
