The Temple and Tatoos
By Molly Trull, Hickman H.S. Senior, Colombia, MO
My face cringes with disgust involuntarily, as I walk past the tattoo parlor inviting teenage customers in with a cheery neon open sign suspended in the window. I don`t even bother looking into the crumbling walls of a building I am sure is full of pain and dead skin, but instead I shift my attention onto the restaurant next door; tattoos have never been appealing to me.
An older man in a beat-up leather jacket stands at a corner, puffing black smoke through a cigarette. I glance at him briefly as he climbs onto his bright red motorcycle and speeds off, sputtering a trail of equally black smoke. I don`t know why he isn`t showing off the dark tattoos I know he`s sporting on his now wrinkled arms. Maybe he`s hiding an ex-girlfriend`s name. At the time, the idea of a tat must have seemed romantic to him and his girlfriend. Maybe she got a matching one. He may like the memories that come with his tattoos: being young, being free, and being in love. However, by now the ink beneath the man`s skin must have seeped into his life, and the name of his ex-girlfriend of a broken relationship will remain on his forearm even in his grave.
I often group tattoos with cheap nachos and old men on motorcycles. My friends, on the other hand, used to buzz with excitement over the idea of turning 18, just so they could legally rebel against their parents and get a tattoo.
"My mom went with me and I got my bellybutton pierced!" my friend called to tell me in junior high. While piercings were not as taboo as tattoos in my family, I remembered my grandmother sporting un-pierced ears and telling me that a body is a temple.
"That`s . . . nice," I forcefully told my friend, reasoning with myself that she only pierced her bellybutton. I grimaced when I imagined it getting infected and bleeding pus out of the coveted hole. At least that kind of wound could heal. A few beats later, the inevitable came.
"Maybe she`ll let me get a tattoo next!" I remained silent after this confession, not wanting to upset her or discourage such a unique form of artistic expression.
Tattoos have seemed to dwindle out of the unthinkable rebellion as time goes on and other opportunities to torture parents arise, but I always tend to dwell on the past. Magazine racks flash tattoos placed so nonchalantly on a front cover. I`ve tried to turn my head away from the offensive form of expression, but tattoos are everywhere.
When Kabala became the new "to-do tattoo," my friends laughed as celebrities stained their skin with wrongly-backwards Hebrew letters meaning meaningful things such as "peace" and "life." I laughed along, but deep down I could feel my stomach acid snarling with disgust, urging bile to come up through my throat. But this reaction was more than an acid reflux, for from a very young age, the untouchable, unthinkable, and unethical nature of tattoos was drilled into my small head. I never understood why, but I was conditioned to know that tattooing of any kind on my body was oxymoronic, just as I knew that I wasn`t allowed to learn German or learn Wagner pieces on the piano.
It wasn`t until I learned about the Holocaust that I began to piece the jumbled conversations with my family together. "Why would any Jew get a tattoo?" I heard a relative saying. Perhaps to rebel, or maybe because everyone else got one. However, if I wanted to rebel against my parents, I might buy a motorcycle or dye my hair purple; I`d never get a tattoo. There are enough marks left on the world from the Nazis, and after they labeled people with numbers written in blood-red hearts that they embedded deep into the skin of their wrists, tattoos do not seem to me a rebellion, but rather conformity in more ways than one.
I remember one summer at my grandmother Klein`s house; I lost an earring while picking bloody mulberries with my bare hands. My feet and my hands were stained purple with the juice of the berries which had also stained the cement sidewalk. I searched for the lost piece of jewelry on my recently purpled knees. My grandmother bent down to help me, and I asked her why she didn`t have her ears pierced. Her voice wavered with pain as she replied, "My body is a temple." Temples are sacred places, and any form of graffiti is sacrilegious.
Note: This article was first published in The Hickman Review (Colombia, MO: Vol. XIX, 2007, 86).
