Five years ago, my at-the-time boyfriend told me that when he sees people with tattoos, he wonders what they’re trying to prove. It struck me because I, his tattooed girlfriend, felt immediately defensive. And it’s stuck in my mind for all these years because it hit exactly the reason why I love my tattoos. I have something to prove.
For as long as I had plans for ink, the ideas were tangled up with my disability, Erb’s palsy, a birth injury to my left shoulder. The injury partially paralyzed my left arm, which is visibly small and misshapen compared with what it would have looked like on a hypothetical, nondisabled body. Before I could walk or talk, I was under the knife for an experimental surgery — a nerve transplant that gave me much more movement in my arm without losing (as far as I can tell) any function in my legs.
Ever since, I’ve had two long scars running down the back of each of my legs, like permanent in-seams on a vintage pair of stockings. My first tattoo was an ivy vine climbing up the right scar. It was important to me to decorate, not cover up, my scar. It was also important, once the summer arrived and the shorts came out, to hear a lot more ‘cool tattoo!’s and a lot fewer ‘what happened?’s from strangers.
I’ve gotten three tattoos since the first one: A Bread and Roses protest sign on my right shoulder, a moon with a pine tree on my left thigh, and a bright orange sun on my left ankle. Now I’m planning my fifth (a spiral staircase climbing up my left in-seam scar) and reflecting on what I’m trying to prove. Here’s what I’ve got so far.
- That I own my body. No matter if strangers and acquaintances demand an explanation for its variance or a detailed medical history; no matter if it’s been sliced open, sewed back up, confined to casts and spring-loaded sprints and other contraptions; no matter if other people’s bodies touch or prod or manipulate it to their liking; It still belongs to me on principle, and I can do what I want with it.
- That I own my pain. When nondisabled people tell stories about medical interventions for disabled people, I’m often struck by the absence of pain. A running joke at my childhood physical therapy office was to march up to the check-in desk and say “reporting for torture,” because so much of physical therapy is stretching your body just shy of its breaking point. When I returned to PT as an adult, the first provider rolled his eyes and snapped, “it’s gonna hurt!” as soon as I involuntarily said “ow.” Surgery, too, is as much physical trauma as it is medical treatment.
Tattoos, to answer a popular question, also hurt (because of all the needles going into your skin). But pain is a different sensation entirely when you get to choose it yourself for an outcome of your own devising.
- That my body’s uniqueness is good, actually. I don’t regret any of the surgeries or physical therapy or doctor’s visits that have helped me to live a functional life. At the same time, most of these procedures were in service of making me resemble, as closely as possible, a nondisabled person. Which I never completely will. It’s an offshoot of one of the paradoxes of disability: Repeatedly being told how brave and inspiring you are on the basis of how inferior and broken your body is perceived to be.
No one has quite my left arm, not even other people who have Erb’s palsy, and no one has my tattoos, either. If my body art can be beautiful because it’s mine alone, then why can’t my deformity? It, like the rest of me, is an inextricable component of the whole to which I owe every sensation I’ve ever experienced, my ability to move through the world, and my existence. Why on earth should it not be celebrated? Why shouldn’t I decorate it?
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