My Inks

My tattoos should be read like photographs. Images frozen in time and space--not moving forward, nor backward. Not moving at all. Zero inertia. Still epitaphs of the person I was and was not; of who I wanted to be and who I didn't want to be. A moment captured; a moment gone. Great symbols of nothingness; tokens of being.

I attribute my tattoos to my spontaneous character. They have all been products of my impetuous and fickle nature, and my zeal for personal expression. I care very little for them in the sense that I harbor no ill will towards anyone who decides they don't like them. I am rarely offended by this nor do I feel the need to defend them. I am not particularly attached, nor am I beholden to them. They simply are. My ink will never define who I am and will never encompass the whole of my complexity because unlike them I am alive; I am not static; I am not frozen in time and space. I am a creature of change and I continue to evolve, leaving behind a trail of immutable symbols, of lost words and images.

But I won't remove them. I don't hate them. I sometimes look at them fondly because, like photographs, they do bring me back to a time and place; like a memory compass. But most importantly, it is my story which I am most proud of. Tattoos can serve as great narrative tools. My own tattoos, however, are nothing but tiny fossil fragments of a personal history that is still being written. Each one unique in the memories they conjure. But let's be clear that I do not need them to remember. My memories and dreams run deeper beneath my skin. My tattoos are not as real to me as my own consciousness and imagination. They are as superficial to me as the clothes we wear and the jewelry we don. Taste is liminal. There is nothing permanent about the things we use to express ourselves. Which brings me to the conception of the tattoo on my left underarm: "liminality".