I’m like, the least Jewish Jew, lol. I have always considered myself spiritual but not religious. I think religion was the OG politics: population control. And here I am blogging about the two topics that are supposed to be off limits. Even on my blog? hehe Nothing is off limits! Anyway, I digress. I got my first tattoo when I was a kid. Yes. A kid. I was 14, my friend had a homemade tattoo gun. The truth? I just wanted to be cool. LOL. Hey I admit it. I was 14! The result was an ugly little rose that makes people go “what IS that?”. I’ve been on the fence about whether to have it removed, or put something over it.
Since then, I’ve gotten more. 2 kanji’s on the back of my neck. One that means pride, and one that means friend, that I got together with my best friend on the way back from a Vegas weekend. I also have a tribal depiction of the infinity symbol on my left shoulder blade. I was 19 when I got both of those. Also when I was 19, right before I moved to CA, I got my only colored tattoo… a butterfly by my bikini line. Got it with my then best friend right before I moved. She has the same one. (2 best friend tattoo’s, hehe). The other? My latest one, that I actually love the most.
…and I am left knowing that I love you more than my own skin.
I got it to honor the love of my last relationship. Though there are a lot of things about it I wouldn’t mind forgetting, it was the first *real* adult “grown folks” kind of love that I just really don’t want to ever forget. Just as much about the victory of discovering that I can love that way, as it was to honor the woman. And no I don’t regret it. I am glad I got it. Because now, as the walls from that relationship that restrained me from being who I am fall down around me, through the cloud of bitterness I sometimes feel… I can look at that tattoo and remember simply… the love.
When I got my first one, my grandparents “plotzed”. I can still hear gramma saying, in her heavy NY Jewish gramma accent, “NOW you can’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery!” Who ever said I wanted to be buried? I want to be cremated. Ashes to ashes… dust to dust. I can’t stand the idea of my physical body, the car my soul drove all my life: rotting and being infested with bugs deep deep in the dirt. Ugh. Another point she made was the tattoo’s the Jews were given in the Holocaust, with the numbers used to identify them. That was horrific, yes: but totally different.
Gramma explained that the Jewish religion said you can’t deface your body. I cleverly pointed out that her getting her ears pierced was no different. She didn’t buy it. I’ll have to forward this article to her. I wonder what she’ll say…
2 months ago