New Tattoo
Making your own choices, having agency, being in charge of your very own self. The older I get, the more I feel the importance of this – to feel you have the leading role in decisions about you.
Though it’s control over your choices, not control over others. There is a long list of people (and places, and things) that we can’t control. I like the Hula Hoop Theory – the image that your area of control extends as far from you as your average hula hoop. You get to say what happens inside this space, and everyone has their own hoop.
Which is how I have a beautiful new tattoo - as my chosen gift to me. It’s not my first tattoo – there’s a tiny heart on my chest from more than a decade ago which has its own story. I love that little heart every day, but there was another piece of art I’ve been waiting for.
Two things recently came together – I found the right artist, and I found the right moment.
I started thinking seriously about tattoos when we first visited New Orleans in 2011. This is a town where more people have body art than not, and I was entranced by it – the colourful, feminine garlands of flowers on so many women’s arms, and other pieces that told stories or carried spiritual meaning or honoured cultural traditions.
I began to see a connection between this body art – thoughtful, rich in symbolism – and what was already familiar at home, the Samoan tatau and Māori ta moko and moko kauwae. Those practices are sacred, but I could also see that decorating your body was something you could do in a deeply meaningful way.
And so I was not freaked out when my grown-up daughter started gathering pieces on her skin – her body, her choice. But also I got it, and admired the work. She and I talked about the tattoo I would want if I was having a tattoo – a tūī, that glorious bird who is both guardian and messenger, and whose song always makes me feel alive and in the moment.
We talked about it so often over the years that, when people asked me if I had a tattoo, I would think of this imagined tūī and say yes, and then remember she wasn’t actually there, and I’d only have the tiny heart to show them which – as much as I love it – barely qualifies.
Meanwhile, my body has been having many things done to it – surgeries, stitches and scars, CT scans, MRIs, injections, tests, monitoring equipment, even a couple of medical tattoos. All of which have been necessary, and I feel lucky to have such good health care, but lots of it is tedious and invasive, and none of them were my idea or something I’d wished for.
And so I wanted to do something for my body that was creative and beautiful, and just for the joy of it. In February I found the right artist – an Auckland woman who creates delicate native birds and flowers – and booked a date for April.
I enthusiastically told a friend who immediately counselled against it (middle-aged lady cliché plus aging skin was a bad canvas) which made me change my mind, but only about telling anyone else until it was done. It is, after all, in a place on my body which is well inside my hula hoop.
It took six hours, or possibly 15 years to get here and it thrills me every time I see it.