Sara Schiff
I am almost 50 years old, and I am in my tattooer’s studio to sleeve my right arm. My anxiety is palpable, this will be my biggest, most visible, tattoo.
***
“Sara, don’t get tattoos,” my mother tells me, “Only addicts have them.”
I am sixteen and I laugh. I am already an addict.
***
The first time I shoot dope starts off like any other party night. I wait for my American expatriate parents to fall asleep and sneak out through the amah’s quarters, hopping a taxi to the Hong Kong mainland to go drinking. I hit on the club owner, who is at least fifteen years older than me. I am infatuated with the idea of being a club-owner’s girlfriend. He is uninterested. At the club’s bar, I lean my head against the bar top so that the bartender can pour tequila directly into my mouth. Buzzing, I exit into the night to walk off my embarrassment. A few blocks away I run across a British guy, a friend of a friend, who suggests we go to his place and get high. He is wearing a t-shirt and shorts given the humid, muggy conditions. Tattoos run down both arms, masking abscesses underneath.
The Brit lives in a decrepit high rise walk up. The air in the stairway is fetid, the rough concrete walls damp, the landings crowded with people using. As we reach the fourth-floor landing, I lock eyes with a Chinese woman, dirt caked around her mouth and nose, her fingernails black. She reaches for me. I automatically lean in, wanting to help. I gather a whiff of pungent body odor and the Brit grabs my upper arm and leads me down the hall to his apartment.
I perch on the end of the arm of a filthy plush chair in front of a cluttered table while the Brit convinces me to do some H with him. A single lamp without a shade rests on the table, the bulb lighting the room just enough such that I can see there is nothing else in it. I refuse to shoot up or skin pop, afraid of needles. I lean over a square of wax paper on the table and snort a line. The world slows, moving just one frame at a time. I nod, the endorphins rushing at me. When I look up, my view has changed. I am no longer seated on the armchair, but am on my back, looking at the ceiling, just barely able to make out some wires dangling from a broken light socket. My view rhythmically blurs until I realize that the Brit is on top of me, his head blocking my view of the ceiling each time he thrusts. I push him off, turn to my side, and puke, the skin of my cheek sticking to the floor, one mouthful of chunky vomit on the floor, another still in my mouth.
“Want some more?” the Brit asks. He holds up a needle. I nod, yes.
***
The tattoo studio, perched on the edge of a cliff along Skyline Drive in Oakland, is a riot of color and pattern. The hardwood floor is studded with strips of brightly patterned contact paper, the effect as if one were walking across a puddle. A small bright pink couch adorns one side of the studio, upholstered in velour, the fabric plush under my fingers. Lighted signs commemorate “tattoo” and “but did you die” in neon.
I reflect on the steps involved in getting a tattoo: selecting an image that resonates, finding an artist, allowing that artist to put it on me. Is this what I want?
***
It was made clear to me, in early childhood, that I should not stand out. Living in a small, wealthy suburb of New York City in the early 80’s, my status as a brown person, half Filipina and half White, was deemed a liability rather than a strength. There were only two other families of color in our town and most of my playdates were with those children.
My mother, a Filipina immigrant who had been in the US for just a few years before my birth, was consumed with the American dream. Her mantra was “don’t embarrass me,” a nod to her fear, as an outsider, that my sister and I would be ostracized. Wanting me to conform to the norms of the time, my parents did not allow me to cut or dye my hair, pierce myself more than once in each ear, or dress in the manner I preferred. Tattoos were certainly not in the formula.
***
“Sara, comb your hair,” my mother tells me. “You need to change your clothes. You look like a ragamuffin.”
***
I am five and I am not interested in having neat hair. I wear my favorite clown t-shirt, the soft cloth fragrant with laundry soap, the red rubber nose that used to squeak just above my belly button. I style this with some neon plaid polyester pants and a pair of brown lace-up leather shoes.
In my own time I comb my hair and change my clothes, as directed.
***
Amy, my tattoo artist, has tattoos running from her shoulders to her hands, all the way down to her upper knuckles. She has a small tattoo on her temple of a multi-colored star, multiple facial piercings, and her medium-length, curly hair is brightly and unnaturally colored.
Amy has a lot of energy, a self-described ADHDer. She is absent minded in an attentive way, almost always getting back to the original topic at hand after a detour or two.
At first, Amy and I make small talk, but as the hours pass, the topics become more emotionally laden. Eventually, I bring up my husband’s concern that if I get too many tattoos, people will stop seeing who I am and will just see my ink, as if I am a walking advertisement. A billboard of my past.
***
“Sara, don’t draw on your skin,” my mother tells me.
***
I am eight and I both love and am afraid of tattoos, shivering when I see women with visible ink. According to my family, only “low class” women, men in the Navy, or people who are dangerous have tattoos. Upper middle class, well-bred girls do not.
Despite this, I draw pictures on my arms with Crayola washable markers, the colors fading on my olive skin, and rub the translucent ink off with a damp washcloth when my mother comes around. I imagine how others will react to my artwork. Will they look down their noses or will they be enthralled? It doesn’t matter, I can do whatever I want!
***
By the time we start sleeving my arm, Amy has placed four large tattoos on me carefully over a period of years: three in honor of my children and the fourth, a nonsensical piece that includes a tiny astronaut floating in a bottle. The rest of my ink, put on by other tattoo artists, pales in contrast, faded with time and stretched by pregnancy. They tell the story of my life twenty years ago.
***
“Sara, make us proud,” my mother tells me.
***
The first time my mother notices I have tattoos I am twenty-four. She has come from Connecticut to visit me in San Francisco where I am presenting at a neuroscience conference. I have turned a corner; four years sober and a year into a PhD program. I have a large tribal tattoo on my lower back. A tramp stamp. The edges are raised where the tattoo artist lined too deeply, the ink a blue black. I am wearing a skirt and blouse, my legs constricted by too-tight and too-short pantyhose that leave me with a second crotch. When we get to the St. Francis Hotel the cab door opens and I duck to exit. Before I can get out of the car, my mother grabs my low-slung ponytail and yanks me backwards.
“What is that!” she yells. She scrabbles at the waist of my skirt, pulling it down. “A tattoo?” I shrug, relieved she has finally seen some of my ink. As I walk into the hotel with her, I realize how little my mother knows about me. Her disappointment and anger pierce me and the day deeply, but unlike in my childhood, I ignore her.
“It’s done now,” I tell her.
***
Amy has me sit on the massage table and place my arm on her small side platform. She arranges me and her accoutrements systematically, obviously practiced at making people physically and emotionally comfortable. She turns on her wireless tattoo gun. I know that when it is on, the gun immediately makes a buzzing sound, but I don’t hear it right away. Instead, the buzz creeps up on me, igniting my anxiety as the volume rises.
Amy asks me where I’d like to start and I ask her to commence at my wrist. I start where there is a point of no return, where I must finish the rest of the tattoo as without it, I would forever appear unfinished.
Amy directs her attention to my body, leans forward, and places the needle against my skin. A dull pain radiates up my arm. I can’t bring myself to watch, but I can feel her gradually needling in the ink. When the pain becomes intense, I find myself dissociating. I picture my blood flowing freely from my skin onto the various tables my appendages rest upon. I imagine a puddle of blood pooling on the floor. It’s mixed with tiny scraps of unneeded flesh razored off by the soldered shading needles which jump up and down into my skin. In real life, the needle gently dances and I rarely, if ever, see any blood.
***
“Sara, don’t embarrass me,” my mother tells me.
***
I am twenty-eight. My mother plans my Connecticut wedding ceremony and reception while I complete and defend my dissertation in Utah. She insists I make decisions only about the smallest of details. I have no energy to protest.
It is my wedding day and I am wearing bridal lingerie, my tattoos on display from armpit to hip. My mother, seeing this ink for the first time, clenches her teeth. “We will pay to have them removed,” she says as I pull on my couture wedding gown. “My guests better not see those.”
I grin. It is no longer my parents’ job to raise me.
“No thanks, Mom. I like them.”
***
Amy works up my arm over many sessions. She covers the script on my forearm, a quote brimming with toxic positivity I have outgrown. She paints the ditch of my elbow and my triceps. The 100-year-old oak tree that lives in my backyard now grows along my arm, surreal pink, red, and blue leaves wrapped up and around my elbow, pine trees flanking it. A small house, my writing shack, rests just above the protruding bone on my wrist. Another astronaut floats on my upper arm, a reminder of my adolescent wish to escape this world and the reality of my own decisions.
This ink is so big it is not coverable. Each time Amy finishes for the day I examine her work in the mirror and contemplate the progress made.
Am I done yet?
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Sara Schiff is a Filipina American MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at St. Mary’s College of California. This is her first publication. You can find her at www.saraschiffwriter.com or on IG @saraschiffwriter