My Tattoo
12/1/2019
I was thinking about my tattoos today and the journey it tells even though once I wished to erase them. The longer I thought about it the more it felt like a map of where I came from and the trajectory that led us here, to the friendship we have today.
I was showing a friend of mine my newest tattoo that I got a few months ago. I tried to make this one as meaningful as possible. In the past I got tattoos that were just cool to me, never finding meaning. However, when I was 27 I got a saying on my ribs that still stands true for me today. It’s been about 10 years since I got new ink on my skin so it’s been a while since I thought about it.
I go on explaining the meaning of my new tattoo to him, how the honeycombs are for the meaning of my name “Honey Bee,” thirteen of them is for my favorite number, a double circle with a dot in the middle means integrity, and the double triangle means feminism. I wanted the “last” one to count.
Then I go on to tell him about my old tattoos…
I was 18 and my cousin Jenny was 15 when I got my first 2 tattoos. She wasn’t old enough to get one so we had to find a shady inexperienced tattoo artist who would do it without carding her, two naive teens, we were for sure. Not sure why we felt we needed to get two but either way we went for it, matching tattoos! At the time we didn’t give much thought on the permanency of having ink in your skin. We didn’t have much family guidance so we were left to our own endeavors. Which was how we spent most of our time, so many years ago.
We literally picked a butterfly off the wall, which I still recently told people it had turned into a moth (pause for laughs). And the second tattoo would be the unsymmetrical heart that was one of the Smashing Pumpkins logos with the S P in it, yeah you heard right, we branded ourselves with a logo of a band we were barely fond of.
I continue to say that as time went on and our lives went in different ways I decided to fill in the heart because I was embarrassed that I had a band’s logo on me. Truth is, I felt people judged me for it.
Some years later, Jenny decided to cover up her butterfly tattoo. Which now meant we no longer have matching tattoos anymore. Underneath the surface, Jenny and I have a long history of joy and sadness alike but it never dulls our deep friendship, no matter how far we are from each other. I truly respect her and admire her strengths, and she always has time to hold space for me.
So, in conclusion, all my tattoos count and have meaning. It shows me the connection I have with Jenny and a reminder of our journey. Jenny is one of my favorite people in the world and has been most of my life, It took me telling this story to a curious friend to see it in a different, more beautiful light and to recognize that this is the history of our life long sisterhood.
Mel Ruiz 