That PhD Life: My Tattoo Story, Part 1

I never liked tattoos. I always thought that if a person got a tattoo when they were younger, they would regret it and it would look terrible and when they got fat, old, and ugly (as would inevitably happen by the age of 30, of course).

My parents also hated tattoos. When we were at the pool and tattoos were everywhere, they would say, “Look at that ugly tattoo.” If we saw someone overweight, my dad would say, “Look at how that tattoo got stretched out. You think a tattoo looks cool when you’re younger, but when you get old it looks trashy,” he would tell me, his tongue sticking out and his face contorted in aversion.

Why would one want to ruin their beautiful skin and body with a tattoo? I also used to think. It was impossible to pick something that would be meaningful for the rest of your life, I thought. I never understood the fascination with the trend. When one of my previous boyfriends expressed his desire for a tattoo, I protested loudly, telling him I would break up with him if he did.

Tattoos are popular in the jiujitsu community, and when my training partners got tattoos that signified their devotion to the art, I had to admit that I was intrigued. Still, I couldn’t think of anything I could live with for the rest of my life.

One day in May of this year (2016) when I was changing in the locker room after jiujitsu, I noticed one of the girls had a tattoo on her leg. “你有纹身吗？” I asked with fascination and curiosity. “Do you have a tattoo?” It fascinated me when I met Chinese girls with tattoos. It signified a certain rebelliousness and rejection of the mainstream in a way unparalleled with the edginess it signified in America.

“Uh huh,” she replied, smiling.

“Wow, that’s so cool,” I breathed sincerely. I then realized that she had multiple colorful and creative tattoos on her legs, feet, and back. She told me later that her first tattoo was a sign of rebellion against her father, who was a police officer. Police officers in China aren’t allowed to have tattoos, and by getting a tattoo, she was telling her father that she would never be a police officer like him, she said.

“I have tattoos too,” the other Chinese girl I train with said. Let’s call her AJ.

“Really…!?” I asked, even more surprised this time since she seemed much more…shall we say conservative? Shy? Good girl?

Oh, females and stereotypes and how they infiltrate our lives and our thoughts.

AJ had a total of three tattoos, including one on her ankle of a EKG heartbeat graph with a volleyball in the middle. She’d been a serious volleyball player for 9 years in high school and college.

“Cooooool….”

I was attracted to the tattoo on her ankle, a symbol of her years of dedication to a sport. I searched online for jiujitsu tattoos. I found similar designs with heartbeat graphs on either side of “jiujitsu” or 柔术 written in the middle, and thought about getting that on my ankle.

Jiujitsu is a huge part of my life, a core part of my identity, a primary source of community both at home and abroad, and a process of meditation, relaxation, and self-awareness for me. It is a practice I am committed to for the rest of my life, and something I hold very dear to my heart because it changed my life in a major way. It’s not that I’m devoted to the martial art itself necessarily, but more so the community I’ve built and the life skills I learned along the way.

AJ recommended her tattoo artist to me, introducing her as LH. I contacted LH over WeChat with a couple designs I had in mind. She told me to contact her 2-3 days ahead of time and we would set up a time to do the tattoo.

Then my grandpa died in June and things changed (link to earlier post about his death and my grieving).

He passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. Okay, okay, so it wasn’t exactly completely unexpected since he was 88. And when I saw him at Christmas of 2015, he was SKINNY. Not the muscular ex-football player and wrestler I had known in my childhood, not the plump round-bellied man I’d known later on when he stopped giving a shit and indulged that sweet tooth for chocolate and pie like no other, but SKINNY. When I visited over Christmas, I knew I was leaving for China that spring. I knew I wouldn’t see him again before he died. I knew I was saying goodbye for good.

BUT it was unexpected in the sense that he wasn’t physically sick. On Thursday, June 9, 2016, he was walking around like normal, but seemed agitated. The nurses called my mom that night and told her that he was having trouble sleeping. The next day was Friday, June 10, 2016. Around 8 pm, he took his last breath.

“Something in the room changed,” she told me later. “I just knew he was gone then. He was just…gone. He wasn’t there anymore. His body was there, but he wasn’t there.”

His soul had left this world.

DECIDING WHAT TO TATTOO

After the funeral, I knew then I wanted to tattoo “Never a burden, always a gift” on myself. Not in English, I decided. I didn’t want people to know what it meant just by looking at it. I also wanted it as a memory of my time in Xinjiang.

Once I decided I wanted to get a tattoo, and I wanted to get it in Xinjiang and in Uyghur, I elicited the help of my Uyghur tutor.

I had told her before about my grandpa because her own father has Alzhiemer’s. He lives with her now, and I go over to her house for class for two hours each week. So I’d seen him around, but he always stayed in the back room, and she had complained about him sleeping all the time before. He didn’t like to shower, so he smelled pretty bad, especially in the summer. And this was July, mind you.

One day, I came over for lunch, and they had her father sitting at the computer desk, facing away from the rest of us, eating alone, facing the computer. My heart broke a little bit. So I told her the story about my grandpa, and they asked me questions like, "What causes it? Is there a cure in America?"

Something similar happened in Xinjiang when my friend’s uncle died of stomach cancer. They said to me, "Surely in America they would have a cure for this."

At first I asked her, “Do you think Uyghur people will be opposed to me getting a tattoo? Because I know it’s against Islam.” Another American friend had told me earlier it was kind of ironic I was getting the tattoo in Uyghur when it was against the Islamic faith to get tattoos.

My tutor told me, “It’s true that Uyghurs would definitely look down on a Uyghur girl who had a tattoo, but since you’re a foreigner, I don’t think anyone would care.”

“I think I want to get it in Uyghur,” I told her.

“Oh, then Uyghurs will definitely love it,” she said laughing.

She suggested I get it done in Arabic script calligraphy. Originally I was just going to get it done in plain script, like the kind you have written on the computer, but she had a good suggestion. “If you’re going to get words on you tattooed for life, you’re gonna want it to look pretty,” she said. I agreed.

"I’ll get my calligrapher friend to design it for you,” she said.

So her friend did it, but it was still really plain, so he got his friend in Kashgar to do it for me, this time a fancy design of 300 RMB.