The Body As Art

There is a girl at my gym that is covered in tattoo. And not the sort of "covered in tattoos" that you normally see and that would probably disgust your mother, with all of the colors and anchors and lions and crosses and confusing items with hidden meanings that would take you years to decipher.

This girl is literally, from head to toe, covered in the most beautiful markings that I have ever seen on a human being's body. I say tattoo and not tattoos plural because it looks as if she just appeared to us this way, with this new type of skin. It is a thing that stands by itself and on its own and should not be spliced up into segments or stories or eras.

It simply is.

Winding up her legs, zigzagging down her arms, sprawling across her back and creeping around her chest is the most elaborate and compelling black ink mark that I have ever witnessed on a human being. She stuns me each time I see her and I have to refrain from staring…simply because it is so striking.

She runs on the treadmill for hours at a time and each time I see her there effortlessly loping away, the gym melts away and the Serengeti plains rise out of the mist and I hear the gentle rustle of Accacia trees in the distance.

She is cheetah-like, both in movement and adornment.

I wonder what it was like to be the bearer of all that pain.

I have a tattoo: a single mark on my lower spine which is the exact right place for it because I was spineless when I got it. Had I really embraced the meaning of the tattoo that I had stitched into my lumbar region, I would have had the tattoo artist place it on my forehead so that I would be forced to confront it daily.

My tattoo means 'to live without fear.'

I find it oddly appropriate that it is in the one place on my body where I cannot see it.

Even if I try.