Tag: tattoo

The Sword

~ emmakosborne ~ Leave a comment

On Friday I absently stuck a temporary tattoo on my arm. I got it from a sheet that came in a Neko Case LP – The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You. On Saturday, I walked into a local tattoo parlour and made it permanent.

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I’ve written about Indelible Marks before.

I’ve been looking for a symbol. I’m yet to write it up, but three weeks ago I took my closest friends to the oak forest in Harcourt and held a goodbye ceremony for my twin sister, Penny. She died when we were thirteen months old. I was too young to remember the funeral. It was a beautiful day, and I feel like something within me has profoundly and forever changed.

I’d planned on getting an Alpha symbol, to remind me that I am the surviving twin, that I am strong, resilient. I just couldn’t see it. All of the placements felt slightly off. It wasn’t like the tree, that I imagined on my side every day for a year.

When I saw the sword on my arm, I knew. This tattoo is strength and passion and truth. It is a quest and a Needle and a cutter of knots. It is honesty and sharpness. It is intelligence, reason, fortitude. It is fierceness. It is forged, by hammers in hands.

The sword is to remind me that I have agency and personal power. It feels right. It feels perfect.

Indelible Marks

~ emmakosborne ~ 3 Comments

A friend of mine is getting a tattoo. I have one – a tree. It is black and is shaded grey and extends up from my left hip and over my belly. My tattoo is the mark of books read, of world trees. A silver tie pin. A refuge. A home that was built out of mud. My dog, barking at a thieving bird. Roots, clasping soil. Growth, always. It is a sunset that filled the world with transformative, bright orange flames. It is family. My father. My sister, lost. It is secret knowledge, mysteries. It is bare branches and strength.

It is an indelible mark that you can see, if I show you. But indelible marks are not always on the surface.

Indelible marks can be made up of songs. Slow songs, old songs, songs about drowning. Buildings. Churches. Cubbyhouses that are walled with old sheets. Marks can be walkways, pathways, routes to work. Colours can mark you. Flowers. Scents. Crushed herbs. Old wax. Biblical jasmine.

We all carry them and they all carry meaning.

People mark us. Lovers. Strangers. Family. The people who heal our hearts and the people who break them. They mark us with their kindness and they mark us with their fury. People mark us with recipes and memories and laughter. They mark us, forever, with that one conversation held deep in the night over a bottle of wine. People mark us more deeply than any needled ink. And we mark them. Sometimes, people show up in ink. And sometimes they don’t.

Sometimes it is a matter of marking ourselves anew.