Working Backwards - in no particular order: Skin Gallery Tattoo #10

Love Drove Me to Rebel.

Alex's first design.  He did not like the layout.

I could stop there.

No explanation needed – especially if you know me really well.  You know that those five words represent every truth about me on every level: physical, mental, spiritual, emotional.  All.

Of course, my ego wouldn’t let me put such a small post out there so, of course, I need to share the whole explanation.  And, as with my other tattoos, there is a larger story…a story of my heart and soul worn on my skin with pride and with love.

This tattoo started so many years ago, maybe a little under ten years ago, with a student of mine.  He was asked to create a piece for the slam poetry fund raiser our class was throwing on the 10th anniversary of the Columbine shootings.

Morbid topic?  Not really – not when you are a member of an alternate program which, at that time, was made to feel unwelcomed in your own school by many of the adults who worked there.  Fortunately, we have come a very long way and this is not the case any longer but at the time it was very painful to teach the kids who were reminded on a fairly regular basis that they were unwanted.
Unwanted at home.

Unwanted at school.

Unwanted by society.

We wanted to unpack how it could be that you could feel so alone and so shitty and so neglected, forgotten, betrayed…so bullied that you would commit suicide by cop and take a bunch of your school mates with you.

What made them different from us?  How did we survive without committing mass murder and they did not?
That group of kids had some really talented poets – some of the best poets and artists I have ever taught.

In that group there were a pair of boys  - best friends – who became the root of my heart.  One, the poet, was expelled and I couldn’t hold him.

The other, the artist/poet, was nearly expelled but wasn’t.

He taught me how to fight – to rebel – to rage against a system that was self-entitled and empowered with the notion that it could chew up and spit out kids because the kid didn’t fit.  He was the first kid I went toe to toe with an administrator over.  I was scared shitless but I had to stand up for him because I was right - we had not done enough, in terms of support, so kicking him out was wrong.

It wasn’t the right thing to do – it was the only thing to do.

I owed him that much – and I loved this kid to pieces.  Still do.  He is, to date, one of the greatest teachers I have ever had.
He created this piece for our slam fundraiser:

Cody's original piece created for the fundraiser.

I took this canvas to my tattoo therapist, Alex Rousey (yep…same artist who created my chest piece) and Alex created his version of CT’s piece.  I loved it.

This was the first piece Alex created for me…February 2013…a little over one year after the car accident I wrote about in my last post, and a couple of months after I needed to leave the trades.  I was soul-deep in Siegfried Sassoon and had come across his poem Banishment, while reading his biography.  When I read:

I AM banished from the patient men who fight
They smote my heart to pity, built my pride.
Shoulder to aching shoulder, side by side,
They trudged away from life’s broad wealds of light.
Their wrongs were mine; and ever in my sight         5
They went arrayed in honour. But they died,—
Not one by one: and mutinous I cried
To those who sent them out into the night.
 
The darkness tells how vainly I have striven
To free them from the pit where they must dwell  10
In outcast gloom convulsed and jagged and riven
By grappling guns. Love drove me to rebel.
Love drives me back to grope with them through hell;
And in their tortured eyes I stand forgiven.
 





I discovered that someone else knew the pain of having to walk away from horrible situations, having done the best they could.  One of my first couple of blog posts is a discussion of this poem and what it means to me.

So, “love drove me to rebel,” popped out and stuck to me and I asked Alex to add the quote to the piece…and the rest, as they say, is history.

Alex Rousey's final piece.  I love it!

I dedicated the tattoo to the boys I left behind and the one I would always carry with me – the one who taught me how to rebel…with love and for love…how to fight for what is right.

Thank you, again, to Alex Rousey and to Cody T – the inspiration and the artist, artist and inspiration.  You know how much your work, and lessons, have meant to me - both of you.  Blessed be you two always.

Mad love to you both.

Tattoo #12 - Four years later

I had planned on writing these pieces in the chronological order of my tattoos but the Universe had other plans for me.  

Four years ago today, one of my beloved students was killed in a car accident, taking with him the life of another student from my school.  This accident was the beginning of the most challenging year in my life – a tsunami of tears and grief that never seemed to end. 

Two years after those horrific months, I booked a tattoo appointment for a memorial chest piece dedicated to the two young men killed in two separate car accidents that year and to a colleague who also passed that year.  This piece was started 16 years after my first tattoo.

Alex Rousey, my tattoo therapist, created a beautiful piece made up of 2 skulls in the style of dia de los muertos, the day of the dead.  The skull on the left is cracked and broken, while the one on the right is whole; healed.  Each skull contains a candle of remembrance.  The skulls are brought together in the centre by a play on the sacred heart.  I asked Alex to create a broken heart pinned back together with staples – a nod to the survivors of the accident (boys I was very close to – one of whom was seriously injured…had to have his abdomen stapled together).  Alex gave the heart stitches, criss-crossed in the center of the heart to hold it together.

At the top, just under my neck, is written:  Plus forte que jamais…Stronger than ever.  I heard these words in the movie Hereafter.  The heroine had been off work after surviving a near death experience when she nearly drown in a tsunami.  Her boss/lover asked her if she was ready to come back to work and she replied “plus forte que jamais.”  She was ready to get her life back to a sense of normalcy, one where she was open to accepting what happened to her; to open herself to the healing process; to move beyond merely surviving the grief. 

 

When I saw that movie and heard those words, I was also ready to be open to a life without grief and the black days of mourning.  I knew then that I needed to wear those words forever…not merely as a reminder to press on but as a reminder that the Universe cares for us in our darkest days and sends comfort in many guises. 

For me, then, Hereafter, was one of those comforts.  The movie, if you haven’t seen it, is a brilliant discussion of life after death and connections to those who have passed into the “…undiscovered country…”  It was a great source of comfort to me in those days when I thought I was getting messages from those dead boys but wasn’t sure if I was just imagining the “signs” because I missed them so much.  Hereafter made me feel less crazy during a crazy time.  It brought me a lot of peace – and also gave me permission to grieve the way I needed to grieve.

During the days when I would go in and get worked on, the boys revealed themselves in songs on the radio, in the things that people would say, and in my dreams.  They knew I was dedicating a piece of flesh to them, to dance into the pain for beauty…and as I healed, I was healing.

Two years ago the tattoo was finished.  Four years ago the pain began.  Today I am in a different place…a better place, I think – thanks to my friends and family. 

A family friend gave my daughter the best sentiment when she was deep in the throes of grief for her dear friend who died in a car accident six weeks after the one that happened four years ago today.  He told her:  things don’t get better – they just get different.  He knew from firsthand experience.  His father had recently died, at that time, and his best friend died when he was a teenager, from prostate cancer. 

Those word were the best thing to have said at that time.

Today I am so grateful for the people who loved me back to health.  For those who embraced me in my pain and waited me out...those who said "your pain is welcome here."   For those whose compassion was the difference between light and darkness.

Thank you to them…

And thank you, Alex, for a beautiful piece…for giving me beauty out of my pain.