Saturday, May 10, 2008

Inked!

I got my tattoo today. A good friend and I had a "memorial" tattoo session. The whole process was impressively quick, efficient, and well-done, unlike my first tattoo, which seemed to take forever. Mine is a small stylized flower design (almost more design than flower) that my husband developed for our wedding invitations. The invitations were the single most expensive aspect of our wedding--letter pressed on beautiful paper--and the thing he was most excited about. The design is very clean and modern, and so now I have a dime-sized tribute to him an inch or so below my collarbone and slightly to my left (my wedding-ring hand).

It wasn't painful in the cathartic way I had been hoping for--not that I am usually a pain buff, but in a way, I think, I wanted the physical pain to remind me of the pain of his loss, which becomes not smaller so much as duller every day. In a way, having gotten the tattoo now feels like just one more way in which he is being left behind. So many changes he has missed out on; so much of my life now lived without him. I got the tattoo to mark his presence, but instead it seems only to make more palpable his absence--and to register the futility of my every attempt to hold on.

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6 Comments:

At 11:14 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

Happy mother's day!

And once again, I am so very sorry for your lose.

 
At 11:14 PM , Anonymous Anonymous said...

loss. I suck. = )

 
At 7:09 AM , Blogger Julia said...

I am glad it was cathartic, but am also not too surprised how it then turned on you to reveal the separation. Grief is like that-- unpredictably complex, I find.
Still, it sounds like a good thing to have gotten it. Any chance of a picture?

 
At 9:38 AM , Blogger Unknown said...

Julia,
Yeah, I'm not really surprised, either. And I will try to post a photo after it's not so red and angry looking!

 
At 6:06 AM , Blogger Lucky said...

I am sure it looks beautiful. I would love to see a picture sometime too.

 
At 8:38 PM , Blogger Yankee, Transferred said...

Hugs, dear D.

 

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