Not just unbroken, but alive and well
December 19, 2024 12:59 AM Subscribe
Tattoos, unlike scars, you get to choose. And each tattoo I have is full of so many of my own choices — each of them represents such an important part of me. When I get a new tattoo, it’s like me saying: I want my story told in this color, and this size, in this location, that looks like this, and reminds me of this, and this, and this. So, where my actual scars might reflect these moments of powerlessness? My new scars, the way I choose to mark my body up with tattoos.... I feel this deep PURPOSE in it. I feel the most amazing sense of self. from The Hard Part Out Loud by Oksana Masters [CW: abuse (and survival)]
Related: Abandoned, abused and belittled: how Oksana Masters survived a torturous childhood – and became a world-beating athlete [Grauniad]
Related: Abandoned, abused and belittled: how Oksana Masters survived a torturous childhood – and became a world-beating athlete [Grauniad]
I've worked on a bunch of Wikipedia articles about tattoo history and practices, and another editor recently did a great revision of the article about cover-up tattoos (CW: photos of self-harm scars and other scars), including about tattoos that people select to modify or distract from the appearance of scars and other markings. I helped with it! I like helping people learn about tattooing as a deeply human practice with thousands of years of history and a zillion living stories. I'm glad tattoos have meant so much for Oksana.
posted by dreamyshade at 11:49 AM on December 19, 2024 [3 favorites]
posted by dreamyshade at 11:49 AM on December 19, 2024 [3 favorites]
I've recently been going completely nuts with my tattoos. I had a two month period where I had one every other week, decent sized etch style work.
My tattooist (and I basically have one these days), is the incredibly talented Lily Collard (hentooth on Insty), and I feel compelled to mention her here because I get a compliment a week at the moment on the quality of the work.
A good tattooist, especially one you build a good relationship with, is like having a therapist who knows your body. No one will love your skin like a good tattooist! I'm getting fatter and fatter and she delights in having a soft canvas to work on, regards each curve with artistic regard. It's Lose Ten Pounds Before Summer and Are You Beach Body Ready? and Letting Yourself Go After Having Kids to the rest of the world but to her it's pure white linen on a stout hardwood frame and I love how delicately she treats it even while stabbing me repeatedly with lots of little needles.
I am reclaiming my own body, in my own way, too. I am making peace with her. I was floored with the opening line here about 'ugly things', and my first big tattoo piece I had done was an anglerfish, a huge beast on my upper arm, a deep sea thing bred in the dark under incredible pressure, ugly and jagged and too soft to survive anything gentle, but she glows anyway. I named her Hope, because you find her in dark places but if you rely only on her glow you'll get eaten alive.
I am reclaiming my body. I've spent a long time putting literally everyone else in the room first. I've not endured the same level of horror as Oxsana but I've got my own stories and plenty I won't be talking about in any depth any time soon due to the shared nature of some of it. I don't want to force people into a position of dealing with their trauma before they're ready, so I'm just dealing with it myself, quietly, in my own way. I have a rendering of the Nobody Knows person (who Lily has transformed into a gender ambiguous figure I call my 'natty lesbian') whose sole reason for being permanently etched into my flesh is that I find it funny, relatable and that its my body and if I want tattoos of any damn thing on it, I can. I don't have to justify it with deep meaning. I can just go, "I thought it was funny" and that's enough, because it's my bloody body and after having so much of my decisions around my body being made for the pleasures and benefit of others (including my kids) I get to just do things to it that are for my pleasure and my pleasure alone.
I am reclaiming all the parts of myself. My calves are death and the maiden, on my right and left legs respectively. They follow each other one step at a time. Momento mori, momento vivire - remember you too will die. Remember you too must live. One step at a time, over and over again. I've stopped chasing death but let her go dancing with me instead. I am reminded that I'm meant to enjoy the world around me too, not stick to some Protestant model of storing my treasures in heaven. I'm going to eat the fruit of the world, drink the wine. Remember to live.
I have a piece across my chest that's the most recent, crossed arrows. "For protection of your light", Lily said to me. Defensive, but functional. Not a sword. Hunter's arrows. So I can go looking too, quiet, if I want, for the things that nourish me. She added a star to guide at the middle. It's flanked on either side by the moon and the sun, I am a child of the universe and deserve to be here.
And for each of those big pieces, you sit there for four or five hours at a time, and you talk, and it gets deep because you're in pain but it becomes a kind of holy pain. She doesn't make me bleed, she's too good for that, but its a good baring of the soul. She's a little older than me, and we talk about art and magic and our children and the rhythm of the seasons, our gardens and the wildlife we fight off the veggie patch, the turkeys on the porch and the possums on the roof. Solicitous of my needs. Offering me breaks and snacks, her fantastic former apprentice, now working quite wonderfully on her own at the next bench, cracking the best jokes you'll hear outside of a comedy club and running me lollies and bottles of water between her shorter clients and teaching me excellent new turns of phrases from the under forties.
And then you heal.
The healing is important. It shows you that you still can.
posted by Jilder at 4:06 PM on December 19, 2024 [7 favorites]
My tattooist (and I basically have one these days), is the incredibly talented Lily Collard (hentooth on Insty), and I feel compelled to mention her here because I get a compliment a week at the moment on the quality of the work.
A good tattooist, especially one you build a good relationship with, is like having a therapist who knows your body. No one will love your skin like a good tattooist! I'm getting fatter and fatter and she delights in having a soft canvas to work on, regards each curve with artistic regard. It's Lose Ten Pounds Before Summer and Are You Beach Body Ready? and Letting Yourself Go After Having Kids to the rest of the world but to her it's pure white linen on a stout hardwood frame and I love how delicately she treats it even while stabbing me repeatedly with lots of little needles.
I am reclaiming my own body, in my own way, too. I am making peace with her. I was floored with the opening line here about 'ugly things', and my first big tattoo piece I had done was an anglerfish, a huge beast on my upper arm, a deep sea thing bred in the dark under incredible pressure, ugly and jagged and too soft to survive anything gentle, but she glows anyway. I named her Hope, because you find her in dark places but if you rely only on her glow you'll get eaten alive.
I am reclaiming my body. I've spent a long time putting literally everyone else in the room first. I've not endured the same level of horror as Oxsana but I've got my own stories and plenty I won't be talking about in any depth any time soon due to the shared nature of some of it. I don't want to force people into a position of dealing with their trauma before they're ready, so I'm just dealing with it myself, quietly, in my own way. I have a rendering of the Nobody Knows person (who Lily has transformed into a gender ambiguous figure I call my 'natty lesbian') whose sole reason for being permanently etched into my flesh is that I find it funny, relatable and that its my body and if I want tattoos of any damn thing on it, I can. I don't have to justify it with deep meaning. I can just go, "I thought it was funny" and that's enough, because it's my bloody body and after having so much of my decisions around my body being made for the pleasures and benefit of others (including my kids) I get to just do things to it that are for my pleasure and my pleasure alone.
I am reclaiming all the parts of myself. My calves are death and the maiden, on my right and left legs respectively. They follow each other one step at a time. Momento mori, momento vivire - remember you too will die. Remember you too must live. One step at a time, over and over again. I've stopped chasing death but let her go dancing with me instead. I am reminded that I'm meant to enjoy the world around me too, not stick to some Protestant model of storing my treasures in heaven. I'm going to eat the fruit of the world, drink the wine. Remember to live.
I have a piece across my chest that's the most recent, crossed arrows. "For protection of your light", Lily said to me. Defensive, but functional. Not a sword. Hunter's arrows. So I can go looking too, quiet, if I want, for the things that nourish me. She added a star to guide at the middle. It's flanked on either side by the moon and the sun, I am a child of the universe and deserve to be here.
And for each of those big pieces, you sit there for four or five hours at a time, and you talk, and it gets deep because you're in pain but it becomes a kind of holy pain. She doesn't make me bleed, she's too good for that, but its a good baring of the soul. She's a little older than me, and we talk about art and magic and our children and the rhythm of the seasons, our gardens and the wildlife we fight off the veggie patch, the turkeys on the porch and the possums on the roof. Solicitous of my needs. Offering me breaks and snacks, her fantastic former apprentice, now working quite wonderfully on her own at the next bench, cracking the best jokes you'll hear outside of a comedy club and running me lollies and bottles of water between her shorter clients and teaching me excellent new turns of phrases from the under forties.
And then you heal.
The healing is important. It shows you that you still can.
posted by Jilder at 4:06 PM on December 19, 2024 [7 favorites]
Thank you for posting this, I had no idea about her and now I am very impressed and stunned by her her. The sheer strength to get through what she did and the sheer humanity she possesses as well, what an amazing human being and good on her for her bravery in sharing.
I have some horrible scars on me, and one thing I did that helped was to get them covered up with tattoos. Tattoos that mean something to me. One is The Monster, from Frankenstein(1931), because as a lifelong artist that is my oldest remembered intensely aesthetic memory, the sensation of seeing him for the first time in the back of a comic book circa 1970 being awe struck by him and yet somehow relating to him as a 5 year old, intensely inward looking creative child deeply out of place in the world. I have my own art on me as well, 2 drawings that have significant meaning for me.
This post really connects something about the ink I have to my own life, and how important it was for me to get the work done as a way of processing that what ended up creating those scars on me.
Anyways, thank you for the post once again, she is is truly remarkable, and her way of talking about her life has really made me think about something very key in how we choose to move forward.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 9:34 PM on December 19, 2024 [2 favorites]
I have some horrible scars on me, and one thing I did that helped was to get them covered up with tattoos. Tattoos that mean something to me. One is The Monster, from Frankenstein(1931), because as a lifelong artist that is my oldest remembered intensely aesthetic memory, the sensation of seeing him for the first time in the back of a comic book circa 1970 being awe struck by him and yet somehow relating to him as a 5 year old, intensely inward looking creative child deeply out of place in the world. I have my own art on me as well, 2 drawings that have significant meaning for me.
This post really connects something about the ink I have to my own life, and how important it was for me to get the work done as a way of processing that what ended up creating those scars on me.
Anyways, thank you for the post once again, she is is truly remarkable, and her way of talking about her life has really made me think about something very key in how we choose to move forward.
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 9:34 PM on December 19, 2024 [2 favorites]
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It's been a while since I've checked out the Player's Tribune, glad it's around for work like this. A close friend used to do a fair bit of ghost-writing and it's a super under-appreciated job. I imagine much of Oksana Masters piece is hers alone, the voice is so distinctive. But still, even editing and revising these pieces is an art in itself.
posted by midmarch snowman at 6:57 AM on December 19, 2024 [3 favorites]