Mel's Tattoo and Her Mother

I thought this would be a good post for Mother's Day, as will be self-evident. It started, however, with a father-daughter outing. My eldest and I were seeing a play in Manhattan back in December. The show never went off, however, due to some staging difficulties. While we were waiting in the lobby, we were standing next to a woman with the following tattoo, and we got to talking:

This tattoo is on Mel (interestingly enough, a name my wife and mother of my children goes by) who told us how this tattoo came to be:

"My mom had been talking about getting a tattoo after my parents got divorced along time ago, but she was always kind of opposed to tattoos. So I told her if she ever wanted to get one, I'd get one with her. [She] never took me up on it for about ten years and then, two summers ago now, she just called me up one day in August, and was like, you're coming home at the end of October, right? We're getting tattoos and I know what we're getting. And I was like, okay.  Two months is not a lot of warning, and so, she had seen on Facebook people getting semi-colon tattoos as a response to dealing with depression and my mom has dealt with depression her whole life. She was like, I just don't want a semi colon I want to do something better and so we put a lot of thought into it and figured out you can make the body of a dragonfly, which is my mom's favorite animal, into a semi-colon ... it's really subtle and you would never know it's there unless I tell you that it's in there and it's got a water lily because that's her favorite flower ... she has a version of this on her wrist and I have mine on my arm."

Interestingly, a woman standing nearby had overheard Mel telling me this and chimed in that the semi-colon is  "a little more specifically related to survivors of suicide, because the semi-colon could have stopped their life but didn't."

Considering how suicide and depression are intrinsically linked, the semi-colon for depression still makes sense and Mel seemed unphased by the stranger's clarification. Tattoos mean what they mean to the possessor and, even if they mean something to others, it shouldn't detract from their power to the person who has chosen to mark themselves permanently.

Mel credited Jake Phillips (@twistedskullstudios) from Twisted Skull Tattoo Studio in La Crosse, Wisconsin with the tattoo.

Thanks to Mel for sharing her tattoo with us! Wishing Mel's mom and all mother's out there a happy Mother's Day!

This entry is ©2018 Tattoosday.

If you are seeing this on another website other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

Veronique And Miranda and Jasmine

I discovered a whole host of tattooed Occidental alumni this week, so we're spilling over into the new week.

Veronique's new ink appeared in a thread on Darin's social media post, so I reached out and asked if she minded sharing.

You are not seeing double, there are two tattoos. Veronique and her daughter, Miranda, got matching ink, Veronique on her back and her daughter on her hip.

She elaborated:

"My daughter Miranda designed it to remind her of home when she goes back to school. Those jasmine flowers are in our yard ... It was the first tattoo for both of us, so it was definitely a mother-daughter bonding experience. And if I’m going to put something permanent on my body, what better than one of my daughter’s designs? And for her, it’s hard for her to be so far away from home all year, so it was her way of staying connected to home and family."

The tattoos were done by Justin Brophy (@finkface) at Empire Tattoo in Upland, California.

The flowers, Veronique told me, are "pink jasmine to remind [Miranda] of home." She is studying in Seattle and "designed the tattoo, then Justin brought it to life with the detail color and shading."

Thanks to Veronique and Miranda for sharing their tattoos with us here on Tattoosday's Occidental Week!

This entry is ©2017 Tattoosday.

If you are seeing this on another website other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.

The Tattooed Poets Project: Zann Carter

Earlier this week, we featured a tattoo from Michael Lally, and he included a photo of his son's matching tattoo. Today, we have a similar mother-daughter combo.

Zann Carter is our tattooed poet today, and she sent us this photo:

Zann tells us how this moon came to be:

"My one-and-only tattoo was done at Solstice 2011, shortly after I turned 60. My daughter, Molly, visiting for our family winter celebration on Solstice Eve, suddenly suggested we both get a tattoo the next day. It was something she had mentioned some time before, as a Mother/Daughter thing. 

 'Maybe a little moon,' she had said, 'I'll get mine behind my ear, it'll be like you're whispering wisdom to me.'

What she didn't know was that I had occasionally fantasized about having a moon tattoo - a blue crescent moon, inspired by the priestess tattoos described in the book Mists of Avalon by Marian Zimmer Bradley. However, I was pretty sure I didn’t want mine in the center of my forehead!

Since the tattoos weren't large or elaborate, we were able to get an appointment the next day, with the artist of my choice, Amber McCarty [at Terre Haute Tattoo Company].   I picked her because she was the artist whose work I'd admired on the arm of a server in the deli, a gorgeous portrait tattoo.

Our day started at dawn, with my daughter and I 'rattling up the sun' in a Solstice ritual during which I had a rather startling return of a crystal point lost a few weeks before.

Then off we went to get tattooed. I remember I told my daughter it felt like many tiny bees. My daughter, who already knew the intense experience of getting a tattoo on her neck, described her behind-the-ear moon as 'a cat scratching, no, clawing...the same spot over and over and over.'

For me, my little blue moon connects me in a special way to my adult daughter, to that day, to the Solstice ritual we share, to the sweet little miracle of finding that crystal. It reminds me of my connection to the Goddess and Things of the Spirit that sustain me.  It reminds me that the extraordinary is all about, that ‘once in a blue moon’ is with me all the time."

And here is Molly's moon:

"My tattoo is her tattoo is my tattoo"

Zann also sent us her following poem:

Net 

Each day I examine what finds its way
into these waters, the shining things caught

 in my net.

I lay them out one by one, sounding
for metaphor, meaning, pretty noise.

Such riches in the ebb and flow:
here is the lovely vocabulary of astronomy.

Listen!

accretion disk, aphelion, apoapsis,
asterism, asthenosphere, azimuth, arc

and that’s only the A’s.

Here is the history of silk, the sad story
of bombyx mori,  a blind moth unable to eat or fly,
bred only to mate, lay eggs and die.

Her very best ending has her offspring boiled,
unraveled from their shrouds, piled in market baskets

and eaten,
while their perfect strands of silk are reeled, plied, woven.

The day’s big finds are stored away in my notebook.

Doomed worms and their cocoons,
a factory floating in the middle of a great lake
where lotus stems become fine threads,

and earnest girls twirling fire in poi pots on distant beaches,
their flames spinning into filaments of light

lingering on retinas.

~ ~ ~

Zann Carter is a poet and fiber artist in Terre Haute, Indiana. She co-hosts a monthly poetry reading now in its 8th year and chairs workshops on healing through expressive arts and storytelling. Her poetry has been published in  Ides of March, SageWoman, Dirty Chai, The Healing Muse, Misfitmagazine and is forthcoming in Witches & Pagans.  She has twice received Grand Prize in the Max Ehrmann Poetry Competition. Her desperately-in-need-of-updating website is at www.zanncarter.com.

Thanks to Zann for sharing her poem, as well as both her and her daughter Molly's tattoos here on Tattoosday!

This entry is ©2016 Tattoosday. The poem and tattoos are reprinted with the poet's permission.

If you are reading this on another website other than Tattoosday, without attribution, please note that it has been copied without the author's permission and is in violation of copyright laws. Please feel free to visit http://tattoosday.blogspot.com and read our original content. Please let me know if you saw this elsewhere so I contact the webmaster of the offending site and advise them of this violation in their Terms of Use Agreement.