I recently got my first tattoo. I knew I wanted a tattoo since I was about nine years old, but I waited till shortly after my 25th birthday. Most of my friends who want tattoos already had them, at least one. But for me, I could never figure out the right image. See, I always knew I wanted my art to be both cohesive and expansive which to me means that I want my tattoos to cover most of what a T-shirt would and I want most of that to be one piece.
This always felt like a curse because I couldn’t commit to the main piece yet. I didn’t want to put something small that would stand out or be hard to integrate into the larger vision later. For years, I told people “I’m about to get a tattoo.” Even when I saw people I’d said that to years later, I told them I’d already gotten it! I just didn’t want to show them, I would say.
I didn’t know how to talk about my own search. It took me almost a decade of toying with the same image to settle on something that both felt like the right thing to honor and the right way to honor it. I settled on a confluence of symbols from my past both personally and ancestrally.
Over my heart is a labyrinth with the tree at its center. The labyrinth is personally in my life primarily through my time in summer camp, as a camper and as staff. For over a decade, I walked the labyrinth of the same design as the one now on my heart as a spiritual practice. Walking the labyrinth awakened a spirit in me that I hadn’t encountered before and probably deserves its own post. The walking of these labyrinths is a practiced observed both by Christian and pagan ancestors. It serves as a bridge between these two often juxtaposed faiths that run in my blood.
The tree at the center of the labyrinth is similarly filled with dual meaning. First, it is a reference to the tree of life, another binding and bridging of my divided ancestry as both Christians and Irish pagans hold that sacred image. Second, this image recalls the actual labyrinth at that camp, as the camp logo uses a tree and it’s named for the forest itself. I finally felt like I had something that didn’t feel like to me like co-opting images with no connection to my own life.
Now that I had the image, I had to find an artist. From having known friends who went through the process of having a tattoo done by someone they didn’t know, I knew that to do what I wanted, I needed to trust the artist and for the artist to trust me. I spent months researching the right tattoo artist. I looked at photos online, read reviews of tattoo parlors around Denver, and asked friends. After giving up a couple of times, and finally coming back, I found an artist that was doing work I felt would reflect what I felt should be there.