Was I beautiful? Was I horrid? Was this me?
I took a deep breath and then refocused my attention on the colorful pictures—my tattoos—that spread across my body as if it were a canvas.
—
I’ve always loved my birthday and have never hesitated to add to the presents by buying myself a few. Call it self-care or self-obsession, but in my opinion, my birthday (and yours, too) should be a nationally recognized holiday.
On my eighteenth, I walked over to Philadelphia’s bustling and quirky South Street in hopes of finding myself, or at least finding a distraction from my search for myself. There, I wound up buying myself two presents: one claimed to predict the future, but wound up predicting nothing more than a twenty-five-dollar deficit in my budget, and the other felt like an impulsive decision, but wound up paving the way for who I would eventually become.
First, I bought a half hour with Tilly, a street-side psychic whose sparkly eye shadow, musical cadence, and bright blue checkered turban lured me right in. I had been planning on popping into a convenience store for something slushy to drink, when I spotted her—or, more accurately, when she sought me out.
“Come to me, child,” she said, and I resisted the urge to respond, “I’m eighteen now. I’m not a child.” Instead, I stopped walking and simply stared at this thirty-something-year-old who, I realize now, was probably a graduate of my theater program and down-and-out. College freshmen are the perfect prey animals, and I was no exception—with my thirst for a Slurpee surpassed only by my thirst for attention and validation. Tilly, I was sure, would provide that.
And so I bit. I followed her back to her makeshift psychic reading space, complete with cheap lavender incense that I recognized from the candle store a few blocks away and a hard plastic “crystal ball” that sat on a table with a plastic tablecloth dotted with drawings of chickens.
“Do you have an overarching question, child?” Tilly asked, and I realized she was speaking with a tinge of a (fake) British accent that I found oddly charming.
“I would like to know who I am,” I said—proving to her that she chose the perfect girl to make a few bucks on that evening.
Tilly proceeded to feed me generalities that I gobbled up without chewing. She said I felt things deeply (yes!), that I was at the beginning of a great journey (how perceptive!), that I had a unique style that would get me far in life (I knew I was unique!), and (here was the clincher) that I had a few relationships in my life that were ( . . . she took a breath and looked me square in the eyes . . .) troubled. “In order to persevere, child, and to truly succeed, you have to be bold. Does that resonate with you?” she asked, and I nodded vehemently, feeling sure that Tilly could see into my soul.
The following week, at my insistence, my friend Hazel went to see Tilly, who proceeded to give her a verbatim reading, popping my bubble and dashing my dreams. Tilly, it seemed, was as fake as her accent. Nonetheless, her advice to “be bold” had already been taken to heart.
But on that evening of my eighteenth birthday, before I knew that Tilly was dishing out garbage to young, impressionable theater students, I would have bet my eyeliner that she knew it all. And so, walking back onto South Street after Tilly took hold of my future and my wallet, I skipped the convenience store altogether and decided I would make my first bold move as a new adult: I would get a tattoo.
—
I decided on a nickel-sized black star on my right shoulder blade. “Why a star?” asked the burly, unshaven forty-year-old tattoo artist wearing a ratty Nirvana T-shirt.
My meeting with Tilly was making me feel a new sense of courage, and so I boldly said, “Because I’m going to be one.” I closed my eyes just after those words escaped my mouth, because I was sure that the tattoo artist was going to laugh at my proclamation—just a smidge, just enough to make sure that I wouldn’t notice, except I would have. So I closed my eyes instead and disappeared into my world of aspiring stardom and newfound adulthood. Let him laugh. Eventually, I was sure, the joke would be on him—and on everyone else who had ever decided I was “less than” because I was fat or foolish.
Getting a tattoo wasn’t something I’d ever seriously considered before that night, because I was sure that it would have conflicted with my acting career. But a small black tattoo was, I figured, easily coverable. In high school, one of my classmates had a tattoo, and I remember being horrified by it. I went home and said to my mother, “How could she just make a decision like that which will last the rest of her life?” But I fixated on her tattoo unendingly—shocked by its permanence, intrigued by its confidence. When I was growing up in Edison, New Jersey, the only thing I considered permanent was my desire to get the hell out.
As soon as the needle hit my skin and I felt a sensation that was very much reminiscent of a cat scratch, I knew there was no turning back. It’s like that moment you go in for a kiss with your beloved and attractive friend, crossing that line for good—there are no “backsies” allowed. Same with a tattoo. Much like my tattooed high school comrade, the permanence of the ink would forever memorialize this moment in my life, and it would grow and evolve as I did.
“You’re done,” said the Nirvana guy.
“That’s it?” I asked, deciding then and there that I would be different now.
“That’s it,” he responded, handing me a mirror and holding up another one so that I could see the tattoo.
There it was—a tiny black spot of proof that I belonged to myself. “Wow,” was all I could muster.
A moment later, the tattooist looked me in the eyes for the first time, and I noticed with a tenderness that surprised me then that his were a deep, royal blue. He smiled at me, in a way you’d imagine a father would smile at his child on the first day of kindergarten or last day of high school, and he said, “I hope you do become a star.”
Maybe the world wasn’t quite as mean as I had always assumed.
“Thanks,” I offered, then let a beat go by. Before I left, I quickly added, “My tattoo is fabulous, but I think it’s my last one. If I’m going to be an actress, I can’t exactly be full of tattoos.”
The Nirvana guy half smiled. “Oh, you’ll be back,” he said.
I rolled my eyes at him—or with him. Somehow, I knew he was right.
—
I wouldn’t see it this way for many more years and many more tattoos, but on my eighteenth birthday when I got a tiny black star tattooed on my right shoulder blade, it was way more than just a proclamation of my intended stardom. I was taking the first of a lifetime of steps to reclaiming my body as my own—marking it with what would eventually be many symbols, pictures, and words that would connect me, for the first time in my life, with my physical self.
As a teenager and young adult, when my self-hatred would become all consuming, or when I simply wanted out of my life as I knew it, I would dig my fingernails into my skin until I bled. On bad days, I would do the same with pencils, butter knives, or semisharp corners of containers. My arms perpetually felt hot and swollen, and yet seeing the marks I would make on my body left me with an inexplicable sense of peace and calmness. I couldn’t control the kids making fun of me, or the world around me trying to make me thin, but I could control my own actions—and the pain that came with hurting myself was a huge relief for me. It was like slowly letting the air out of a balloon that would otherwise pop from too much pressure. Focusing on the very calculated and conscious act of scratching and hurting myself provided a way to let the emotional pain escape. The feelings I had when I was bullied, and when I felt stuck inside a body that I didn’t feel was my own, were the most isolating, scary feelings I had ever experienced. Finding a physical outlet for that, in many ways, got me through my adolescence.
Looking back at this, I am, of course, brokenhearted that the only way I knew to combat bullying was to turn on myself. However, at the time, I didn’t see it as turning on myself. I saw it
as a way to reconnect with myself, to recognize that I was a physical being and not just a cloud of circumstance and sadness. It made me feel real.
I am not going to say that getting tattoos is the adult version of self-mutilation—I don’t think it is. In fact, I think that in many ways, it’s the opposite—at least for me. It’s adornment, beautification, and, most importantly, it’s repair. It’s self-expression, self-acknowledgment, and self-respect. It brought me back to myself in a creative and profound way that was both personal and universal. That process started on the day I became an adult, the day I decided to be bold—the day that a tiny black star found its way from an impulsive idea to a tangible creation. Once it was on me, it became a part of me. And then, magically, a part of me began to heal.
The Nirvana guy was indeed right. I would most certainly be back for more.
—
“More” started a year later with another star tattoo—or, more specifically, a tattoo of a Chinese character that meant “star.” Years after that, after finally delving into much more elaborate body art, I was actually concerned that I had been misappropriating Chinese culture and language (an idea that Denise, my short-term girlfriend who had effectively brought me out of the closet, planted in my brain), neither of which I knew much about. So I covered that Chinese character with a rescued cow whom I had met at Farm Sanctuary. The original tiny black star was also eventually covered with a bigger, more colorful one—but the point remained the same, and I still wanted to shine. I felt I had been dulled for so long.
One of the most interesting things about tattoos, for me, is that they evolve as we do. Sometimes their meanings remain intact—a reminder of a time in our life that was so meaningful to us that we memorialized it forever. It will forever be a part of our hearts and our bodies. But sometimes, as we change, the meanings change, too.
—
Throughout my twenties, I continued to get mostly small tattoos—the Sanskrit word ahimsa (meaning “nonviolence”) on my ankle. The number 267—representing the number of chickens killed in the United States every single second—on my left wrist. A V (for “Vegan”) on my right wrist. Later I got a lightning bug—a sign for me of the light of truth and honesty—on my left hand. And since I had now ventured into the world of hand tattoos, on my right middle and ring fingers I got the outline of a sunrise—a hopeful reminder that there’s always another sunrise and another chance. I loved my tattoos, but at some point early on in getting them, I also recognized that I was beginning to look like a child had taken a Magic Marker and colored on me here and there. There was no uniformity, no grand plan.
Then, one day, early on in my relationship with Mariann—when I was about twenty-seven—she said that if I was going to do it, I should just totally go for it. If I was going to be a person who had tattoos, I needed to own that. My small, sporadic tattoos were beginning to look and feel random. That was when I decided to be bold once again and tattoo three-quarters of my right arm. I decided on a colorful and proud hen who had escaped a cage—the angry, red bars behind her. The meaning was twofold: There was, of course, the literal meaning—animal rights is my cause and my worldview. I loved the idea of wearing hope on my sleeve, quite literally. I wanted a world where animals were liberated, and my tattoo represented that.
But it also acted as a metaphor for me. I was, of course, still fat. Coming from a lifetime of being mocked and misunderstood, I had, in my own way, felt as though I had been confined for years. Like my hen escaping a cage, I wanted to savor and appreciate freedom. My tattoos each represented a small, bold step in the long process of reclaiming myself, beginning on my eighteenth birthday and continuing throughout my fat twenties and my thin thirties. With each line and color I etched onto my skin, I felt I was my own person, more and more.
Pigeons have always been heroes to me, which is why, years after I first got my three-quarter sleeve of the hen, and shortly after I lost the weight, I decided that the final addition to my sleeve tattoo would be a pigeon in flight. The Dutch had brought rock pigeons—the pigeons that we see on every urban street corner—to the colony of New Amsterdam (now, of course, New York) as “food animals,” but they escaped, and now they are loathed far and wide by people who resent the fact that they eat, shit, and reproduce. My general rule when it comes to which animals are my favorites is this: The more misunderstood and maligned they are, the more I adore them.
So my pigeon tattoo was a no-brainer, and it also became a no-brainer for Mariann to get a variation of the same bird. She was sixty-two, and it was her first tattoo—proving that it’s never too late to change your look, or your outlook.
—
“Do you know that people stare at you?”
A friend of mine recently brought this to my attention while we were out for a run in Brooklyn. I was wearing a tight black running shirt with checkered leggings that stopped midcalf. It did not occur to me that anybody was looking at me except to maybe narrowly avoid me with their bikes—Brooklyn cyclists can be vicious.
I could barely keep up with my friend, who, unlike me, had been a runner most of his life. Even though I had been running regularly for three years by this point, I felt I was still discovering the fact that I had feet, and that they could move me to different places.
“What do you mean they stare at me? Is there something coming out of my nose?” I responded, in between heavy breaths, as I forced my body to jog slowly up a large hill.
“They just . . . do,” he said. “Try to notice.”
And so I did.
The idea that I was being looked at by passersby both frightened and intrigued me. I was somewhat surprised to learn that I was still being looked at, and yet a part of me was also unperturbed—of course they’re looking at me. The truth is, I loved the idea that I was being looked at. But just as vehemently as I did, I loathed it, too. I wanted the entire world to leave me alone.
It had always been that way. When I was a kid, I coined the term “New Jersey stare.” The New Jersey stare was—and, honestly, remains—the blank, perplexed gaze I would get when I was walking around in the mall or at the amusement park. Kids and adults would fixate their eyes on me for a moment too long, making me feel a mix of self-conscious and famous. Since I was a chubby kid, the easy reaction by my peers was to make fun of me—that was a clear and immediate way of dealing with my unstated demand for attention. And so early on, I ingested the fact that they were staring at me because I was a fat girl. Decades later, as a newly thin adult, when people would continue to stare, it was difficult to shed that notion—that they were still looking at me because I was fat, or otherwise undesired. And so I decided, once and for all, to give them a reason to stare.
Perhaps, then, my tattoos are on some level also a way of flipping the bird to people who look at me anyway. It’s similar to acting, where the dichotomy of “look at me”/“don’t look at me” is a well-known phenomenon among theater people. Clearly I like attention—it does not take Freud to figure that one out. But just as I enjoy, on some level, being in the center of the action, it concurrently makes me uncomfortable when I feel too seen. My tattoos are a very real piece of me that I have decided to share with the world. That allows me to be the one in the driver’s seat, since I determined, by way of my body ink, the parts of me I am okay with being in the spotlight. They make me vulnerable, but it’s a self-inflicted kind of vulnerable. And, at the same time, my tattoos protect me. They are my armor and my strength.
My pigeon tattoo was probably my eighth or ninth one, depending on how you choose to define where a tattoo begins and where it ends. The idea of questioning where something begins and ends was profound to me in those early days when I was losing the weight, transitioning from a fat girl to an anonymous size that the world ignores and finally to a size that is arbitrarily and foolishly celebrated.
—
And so there I still stood, in the dressing room of that thrift store, st
aring at my near-naked body—at this current of ripples, skin, muscles, freckles, and ink that made up me. There in front of me was the stunning pigeon on my right upper arm. And there was the cow on my right leg. There, too, were the remnants of my “old self,” which was actually, I realized now, still my current self—such as my ahimsa tattoo, and my star that I couldn’t see but knew adorned my back. The colors and patterns that were on me were also inside of me, etched into me—this was me.
You might say that the tattoos saved my life. They gave me an outward focus on an inward evolution. At the end of the day, when everything else except my eyeliner was foreign to me—they allowed me to recognize myself in the mirror even after the rest of me had changed so drastically.
There are things we shed as we evolve. We shed old perceptions of how the world works, letting new ones in. We shed friends—though not all of them—and we shed dreams, sometimes allowing surprising ones to find a place within us. And we shed skin—constantly—yet somehow, tattoos remain intact.
I left the thrift store that day with four new (well, new-to-me) outfits. As I was paying at the register, I caught a glimpse, yet again, of someone staring in my direction—but this time it was Mariann, who was also getting herself a new-used sweater. We locked eyes and she smiled, her big blue eyes sparkling like the heart made out of sequins on the T-shirt I was buying. But unlike the T-shirt, there was nothing manufactured or gaudy about Mariann’s affirming expression. It was peaceful and genuine. I realized then that unlike my new body and my new outlook, Mariann’s unwavering presence was not reflecting to me the things I had shed, but quite the opposite: Her consistent support was proving to me that, much like tattoos, there are other constants in our lives that we don’t shed—they are as permanent as ink.
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