To the Man Who Gave Me the Tattoo Behind My Right Ear
by Alice May Hotopp
To the Man Who Gave Me the Tattoo Behind My Right Ear,
Afterwards, you stood on the gray sidewalk, gray smoke wafting from your cigarette into the gray sky. Wind-born trash skittered across the street. I don’t remember what you looked like, except for gaunt like that city corner, and I’m not sure I ever got your name. I doubt you ever asked for mine. Taking the cigarette’s thin cylinder from between your lips, you flicked the burning end onto the pavement. Crushed it with a heel. It’s funny, you said casually, how it only takes me fifteen seconds to change someone forever.
The tattoo was small, and yes, only took seconds for you to etch into me. You drew the gun across the boney rise behind my ear. The needle pierced me dozens of times per second, but it felt like no more than a ballpoint pen being dragged, hard, along my skin.
While you said that this part of the body has few nerve endings, it seems meaningful to me that I felt numb. My boyfriend had pushed me to get the tattoo, picked out the parlor, got me on the schedule, driven me there. When I walked into that grimy shop from that grimy Sacramento corner, your burly coworker leered at me from behind the front desk. Here to get your sorority tattoo? When I showed you the sketch of what I wanted, a single line of mountain peaks, the downward slope of the last peak looping into a rising sun, you glanced at it, uninterested, and shook your head. No. It’ll look better this way. You got to work drawing on the stencil while I sat in uncertain silence, gut churning and heart thudding. What was I letting happen to me?
Even with my misgivings, the tattoo gun pounding into the tissue above my cochlea flooded my veins with adrenaline. I felt giddy. I was doing something edgy, risky, permanent, fulfilling some early twenties urge to be devious. It was unlike me, usually quiet and reserved. I thought a new, bold tattoo would mark the beginning of a new, bold me.
That evening, I pulled back my hair to show the tattoo to my boyfriend’s mom, red and shiny beneath the thin plastic bandage. She said she loved it and I smiled, hoping she meant it. (When I called my own mother on the opposite coast and mentioned, casually, that I’d gotten a tattoo, just a small one, she inhaled sharply and then stayed silent as I berated her for being uptight). I had my boyfriend take a picture so I could see. It was crooked. It looked nothing like mountains looping into a sunrise. Maybe like some wonky lightning bolt or an awkward appropriation of an arrow. The rush I had felt, about marking my skin with a symbol of my own, faded. I was marked instead by your indifferent hand. The image of you flicking the butt of your cigarette onto the cement flashed in my mind. I felt like those embers being stamped out. 15 seconds.
When people asked me what my tattoo meant, at first I said that it was mountains looping into a sunrise while they squinted and tilted their heads, trying to find the resemblance. Oh yea, I see it, the more tactful ones would say. Then I started stammering that the tattoo artist had messed it up. Eventually, I began deflecting the question entirely. My cheeks flushed with shame each time I remembered what I let you do to me.
You see, Man Who Gave Me the Tattoo Behind My Right Ear, that this forever mark came to represent something more, something darker than you dismissing my wishes and your coworker’s smirks and my boyfriend’s controlling behavior and me saying nothing. And no, it never did represent the emergence of a new, bold me, like a muted nymph peeling itself into a shimmering dragonfly. It represented my numbness.
If I’m honest, this was not all, or maybe at all, your doing. I had gone numb three months before your needle pierced my flesh. I had gone numb in an Idaho mountain town, where the air smelled of sunlight and sagebrush and the sulfur of hot springs. I had gone numb as soon as he groped me at the party at the cabin. 15 seconds. I fled to a quiet room. 15 seconds. His silhouette filled the doorway. 15 seconds. The sweaty, dust-rising dancing of that afternoon, the twirling and stamping of boots and yips for the band, felt so distant. 15 seconds. He backed me into a corner. 15 seconds. Out the window, the shadowed mountains ripped into the starry sky. 15 seconds. A shout was trapped somewhere in my throat, rattling to escape. 15 seconds. The evening’s fireworks still burned behind my closed eyelids. 15 seconds. I floated above my body, watching.
What was I letting happen to me?
You see, Man Who Gave Me the Tattoo Behind My Right Ear, I know nothing about you. Maybe that’s why it was too easy for me to trace the dots between the moments of that summer, drawing you as the man who had left the visible mark. The other wounds, still permanent, had edges too gaping, too amorphous, too engulfing to delineate. They lurked in the dark places of my skull, and when they emerged, swallowed me whole, left me back in that cabin. Left me unable to speak. They drew raised eyebrows and whispers and belly-aching doubt about who was to blame. At least the tattoo was physical proof that I had been wronged. Something I could trace with a finger.
In the months and years that followed, I slowly disentangled myself from that boyfriend, moved back east, started seeing a counselor. As I returned to my body and shed the need to be someone else, I resolved to reclaim the tattoo for myself. To keep it as a reminder. A reminder to speak up, to hold my ground, to be bold. Still, its ink gnawed at me. When I saw it, I could almost feel the carpet of that room, the cold edge of the counter against my back, the hands on my body. And then, the spreading numbness.
Just a few months ago, a friend covered up the tattoo. She replaced it with an image of a mountain laurel, a delicate pink flower that grows along mountain ridges where I grew up. Nothing edgy. Something spirited yet tender, that unfurls with bountiful sunlight and gentle rain. Something more like me. She gave me the cover up during a weekend’s stay at a cabin on the coast, me lying on the couch with the hum of the ocean and the tattoo gun filling my head. My chest vibrated not with adrenaline, but with a deep calm that I hadn’t realized I yearned for so badly. When she took a picture to show me, I felt giddy. It was just what I wanted. The airy, looping petals, drawn with a kind hand, a symbol of vibrancy and light and feeling. A symbol of my own quiet power. All it took her was 15 seconds.
Alice Hotopp is a Maine-based writer and ecologist. Her essays and poems have previously appeared in outlets including Eastern Iowa Review, Five Minutes, and Maine Public Radio’s Poems from Here program. https://www.alicehotopp.com/
Photo by Fallon Michael on Unsplash