birds on a line.

on first tattoos in middle-age.

Saturdays at Welcome Tattoo are devoted to walk-ins. You stand in a line well before they open to add your name to a sign-in sheet. There were about 15 people in line when I arrived at 10:35am. They open the sign-up sheet at 11 and the shop itself at 12.

At first I thought it would be a typewriter. Or a quill in a pot of ink. A single word, a scripture. A tree with a Black girl reading a book in its branches. I considered having it etched in a space that clothing typically concealed; it would exist as a secret, revealed to a cherished few. Then I thought of the billboard that is the outer bicep, a favored location where all the world would see. Maybe stars and a crescent moon between clavicle and shoulder? Perhaps a tiny black heart hung low on the curve of a hip? 

It took me years to even think of the possibilities. I was raised with Pentecostal leanings and aesthetically marking the body had always been frowned upon. Sometimes the body itself seemed frowned upon. It was something to keep covered, an outer casing for the most essential part of the self: the soul. Its instincts could not be trusted. Its urges were not only to be suppressed but, ideally, ultimately, killed. We were dying daily to the flesh, so what reason would there be to adorn it? 

When I was growing up, tattoos carried many connotations for women and most of them were negative. Tattoos suggested immodesty, an eschewing of purity and innocence, an invitation to wanton eyes to roam an exposed bit of body. Tattoos were seen, in my tiny circles, as symbols of a life hard-lived. 

As a girl who wanted grow into an artist, I didn’t believe tattoos were as taboo as they’d been touted. For me, they just symbolized risk. They were visual declarations that the choices a person made about their body were theirs alone.  Whether guided by impulse or laden with cryptic significance, tattoos were an intimate discourse best understood to the wearer. 

That doesn’t mean I liked them. The first tattoos I ever saw up close were at my high school. In the mid-to-late 1990s, teen tattoos were as trendy as oversized Polo, Nautica or Tommy Hilfiger and herringbone chains. Tattoos carried the added cachet of rebellion, though: showing up to school with one under the age of 18 meant you’d procured it illegally. Pulling that off, presumably without parental consent, was a stark and undeniable proclamation of grownness. No matter the tattoo itself, whether Marvin the Martian or the traditional Chinese symbol for courage, it seemed emblematic of adult decision-making because it was irrevocable. 

Back then, we weren’t thinking much about regret, so it’s likely we didn’t care how a tattoo could be covered or how most evidence of it could be lasered away. In high school, having one just meant you were individuating. 

I didn’t individuate for a long time. I went off to college but I came home a lot. I spent the first half of my 20s with my mother and even after I moved away, her influence (and my nana’s) never felt too far. Neither of the women in my immediate family have tattoos. Neither regard them with much admiration. So it would’ve been hard for me to, had I chosen to get one early in life. 

I was deep into my 30s before I even considered it, well on my way to becoming a woman whose inner voice was not hidden under the tenor of her matriarchs’. It wasn’t until then that I could be sure that if I chose to adorn my body with permanent ink, I’d be doing so simply because I wanted to, simply because I liked the idea. 

Of course waiting till your mid-30s to make skin-altering decisions means doing so with a fuller understanding of regret, a higher awareness of risk, a constant calculation of what might constitute frivolity. 

How much did I really want this thing? Would it be worth the investment? Would I want to look at whatever image I chose every single day of what’s left of my life? How will it look stationed against the crepes and spots I’ll acquire if I live to a ripe old age? What symbol(s) could possibly be representative enough of who I am to warrant permanent real estate on my skin? 

It wasn’t until I left home—this most recent time, in 2020—that I could finally begin to address those questions. I had to spend real time with my middle-aged self to determine if a tattoo was right for me or merely one more thing to resist and romanticize? 

As a parent, I live within fairly strict confines. I am at home every night. I rarely date, rarely travel alone, rarely spend more money than I should. I make the choices I believe best benefit my daughter, even when they feel counterintuitive to the woman I once hoped I would be. I wait for the years when she and I are both adults, when who and where and how I am are less tethered to her senses of care and security. And I look for small moments of self-assertion. I listen to the parts of myself that say: your daughter is not the only person for whom you are setting examples. 

Motherhood is not my only identity. It’s not even my primary one, now that I’m 13 years into it. It’s receding a little to make space for all my other parts. My experience with motherhood is becoming that much more expansive. So I am giving myself permission to stop putting so many things off. 

this took all of 10 minutes.

In the end, I didn’t think too much about it. I found the tattoo I wanted three days before I got it. I got it so soon because it was my last summer weekend on my own, before my daughter returns from her dad’s. All those years of researching images and placements distilled into a fairly simple decision. 

I chose this, primarily, because it’s pretty. It suits my minimalist sensibilities but it isn’t so fine-lined that I’ll be able to forget it’s there. 

I suspect its meaning will multiply with time. For now, it is me, independent but receptive to company. It is me and my daughter, constantly changing position, coming to sit at each other’s side. It is me and the audience I hope to eventually find, me drawing folks closer with whatever I’ll create. It is the sparrows on whom God keeps His eye. 

A bird at ease and a bird in flight. I exist, at turns, in both states. 

My first tattoo is still healing. It itches a little and the lines look slightly less clean than the day I got it. There’s a bit of ink bleed, a faint and hazy blur of black into brown. It’s making its home just under the skin, and I’m getting used to catching sight of it in the corner of my eye every morning.

More than once in the past four days since I got it, I’ve imagined myself at the end of this life, lying in a bed, looking down. I’ll be waiting for an angel to descend. I’ll be welcoming a new and endless home.