My Body, My Temple: An Appropriation of Divinity

Full-bearded and husky, my tattoo artist was dripping in ink. I’ll call him Pierre, because why not. What I’d assumed at first glance to be benign lipoma in Pierre’s forearms turned out to be ball bearings, at least three in a dispersed line up each arm, bulging under the skin. I can’t even say they were surgically implanted because surgery suggests medical grade anesthesia, maybe even a hospital, and the polaroid Pierre showed us was of a much younger man during the “operation,” sitting at what looked to be a kitchen table.

No anesthesia, he confirmed. Just way too drunk.

There were two incisions, one near each elbow; the ball bearings for each arm were first inserted and then moved subcutaneously over the meat of his muscle, into position. Pierre said the pain nearly made him black out.

I didn’t pry into the why of it. This was a man who also said that he stays home with his family now on the weekends, because when he goes out with his friends he does stupid things like The Stuntman, a tequila shot in which you snort the salt and squirt the lime in your eye.

It was almost too easy to underappreciate the bizarreness of this information as a precursor to what Pierre was about to do to my body, what I was paying him to do—to inflict pain upon it, commit it to ink, to facilitate my yearning to try my hand at the making of myself.

I was raised to believe that my body was a temple, and there is something gorgeous in the runaway idea of its being holy simply for being mine…

A Human Tradition

You’re taking part in a human tradition that goes back thousands of years, another employee said, observing my nervousness. Pierre confirmed that I was instantly a hundred percent cooler the second he finished my first tattoo: Kylo’s birthday in roman numerals on my left forearm.

I showed him my favorite of Kylo’s baby pictures, to let him know this was no frivolous fixation.

Who wouldn’t run out into traffic for the fluffiest little Link that ever was? Who wouldn’t want his birthday branded in their flesh? I was prepared to defend the decision with historical precedence too—archeologists were discovering the shared graves of man and dog long before an anxious millennial bonded inextricably with an anxious border collie. Of course, Pierre didn’t bat an eye. He showed us pictures of his shitzu/yorkie, an obstinate bundle named Rupert.

And then he showed us his lower leg, above his ankle, where he’d given a portion of the dwindling real estate on his body to his two children—eight and ten—to tattoo anything they wanted, artists in training. There was a wavery Bart Simpson and something with horns.

Pierre was Mexican, like me, and like me, his family’s “odd one out.” He showed us pictures of his parents and siblings, all of whom looked clean-cut, even sedate. Whatever skin was visible was un-inked. They were devout Catholics, and while he remained believing, Pierre had unlearned the need for confession or church attendance in the practice of his faith. He’d started studying as a teenager what Catholicism had done to the indigenous peoples of Mexico and he decided to leave the structure, taking with him only the parts of it that had to do with god.

Appropriating the Divine

Example One:

I was raised to believe that my body was a temple, and there is something gorgeous in the runaway idea of its being holy simply for being mine, not because it’s on loan or purchased with contingencies. But because it’s mine, miraculous in the present form of its evolution, in its irreplaceability. Mine to contort into yoga poses, mine to doctor with medication and nourish with vitamins, mine to intoxicate and make dance for hours on a sweaty Sunday afternoon, mine to take in for a mole-check, mine to curl around the person I love whenever and however I want.

Mine to mark with whatever is already branding it from the inside out.

***

Example Two:

Pierre said he once worked in a warehouse with a woman who befriended him almost instantly after their first meeting. She’d greet him brightly every day, bring him cookies, and tell him repeatedly that she was praying for him. Then she learned the truth about the lumps in his arms.

“You did this to yourself?” she gasped. “You defiled your body?”

She never spoke to him again, betrayed by her own assumption that he’d had cancer and had therefore been worthy of her Christian friendship and kindness.

“My Passion Wars Against the Stiff Brocade”

Pierre laughed through the story of his coworker as he worked on my second tattoo. Meanwhile, I clung to the hands of my beautiful tattoula (tattoo doula) and schooled my breathing through the pain. I’d been sitting on the idea for this tattoo since at least September 6, 2015, which is when one of my papers for Modern American Lit is dated. I’d written a response to the poem “Patterns” by Amy Lowell:

My favorite line in the poem, which I want tattooed somewhere on my body or at the very least framed and hung up on my bedroom wall, is “my passion wars against the stiff brocade.” The narrator chafes against her life-prison of patterns. Her fiancé has died in “a pattern called war” and she regrets the social patterns that prevented him from “loosing” her stays before their marriage. He was going to set her free, and then he died.

Lowell is likely not writing about herself—she was never engaged to a lord and her long-term partner was a woman—but she would have had the experience of wearing whale-bone stays, and of having to live a life that was framed by the context, and the men, of her time. But unlike the narrator of “Patterns,” Lowell set herself free.

“My passion wars…” remained with me over the years, but when I returned to the idea again, I borrowed three more lines from Lowell’s poem and rearranged them:

***

gorgeously arrayed

boned and stayed

my passion wars against

the stiff brocade

***

***

Lowell’s words are angled with my ribs, where the whale-bone stays of distant eras would have bit, and the temple of my body feels blessed for the reminder of it—my comparative freedom, the choice I’ve made, like Lowell, to loose my own stays.

Pierre’s body is blessed too with the etchings of his children. And those unfathomable ball bearings—what’s the story of that man’s relationship with pain? Why had he done it? And could the answers in any way mean anything in the grand scheme of the universe, to the extent that he should now accept a certain level of treatment from other believers?

No. And I suspect his answers would echo mine to a degree, or anyone who’s found it necessary to mark themselves permanently. I may not understand the language of his reasons, whatever they had been as a drunk eighteen-year-old, but mine, as a sober thirty-two-year-old, was reclamation.

The Audacity of Self-Expression

Experience has taught me to watch out for the people and structures in my life that would try to tell me I’m too sensitive when their actions result in my pain. Because now I know how it feels to believe them, and to imagine myself deficient in some guilty way that devalues my feelings while excusing theirs as justified, or as the bane of personal demons. Unchecked, their pain, their conditions on your right to express yours, will choke your air until you find yourself without a voice, forming demons of your own.

I know how it feels to be caught in a cycle of emotional abuse, inflicted and received, and to be crippled by a total and illuminating loss of self-worth. The finishing touch was the schema-deep certainty that I would never be happy again, and all the ideation that follows. For some, this can be brought on or exploited by an individual(s), or an institution, or a venomous cocktail of both. But what we all have in common is the opportunity to reclaim it, that locus of control, peace, and confidence—that irreducible knowledge that we, like the boundaries we set to protect and empower ourselves, are sacred.

***

I’ll confess to a few hours of regret after I woke up the next morning and wished I’d moved one word to another line. I’ll confess to a few tears of surreal amazement at the permanence of what I’d done, as both tattoos wept ink and plasma under their Saniderm wrappings and needled like a sunburn.

My body is a temple, and the old lessons taught that I should therefore leave it as unaltered as possible, to better perfect it as a vessel for the housing of the holy ghost, to show it the proper respect as a loaner vehicle from the lord. Or I would render myself unfit for his presence. There are the unwritten exceptions, of course, for changes made in the pursuit of physical perfection—plastic surgery, acrylic nails, permanent makeup, hair bleach—all things everyone should do anyway if they want to, without judgment or hypocrisy.

Who do I think I am? I laugh-cried to Long-term Fiancé. I never thought I’d do it, to be honest—commit myself in this way to the audacity of self-expression. The piercings were one thing, and I love them, but this?

“You’re not important enough to speak in permanence,” warns my internal naysayer, the vestige voice of my teen angst and serial apologizer: “Who do you think you are?”

But the doubt, the regret, didn’t last. I’m in love with my tattoos. They were a destination for years and are now a waypoint in my pursuit not of perfection, but of perfect love for myself. My body is a temple; I would assert the divinity of it even now, require worship upon entry and street shoes at the door. I would obligate my patrons to speak gently within my walls, walk softly, laugh at my jokes, and to weep at the altar of my worth.

No one should settle for less.