My favorite tattoo is one I have had for about fifteen years, based on a design I put together for a high school project twenty-one years ago. Every tattoo I get is the result of months to years of thought and planning so that every bit of the piece holds specific, personal meaning to me.
As someone who strongly believes in accepting the process of change, I’ve realized that my own interpretation of my tattoos and what they represent has shifted over time.
Strap in; this is going to be a long ride.
Initial Design
I was sixteen in 2001 and a Junior in high school–
That’s grade eleven, for those who may not use this term.
–when we had a project in my English class where we designed and created a paper mache mask to embody a character trait or emotion. I believe that this was in reference to the old Greek theater masks that actors would wear to portray their characters.
I decided my mask would be a symbol for myself, and it would display a number of emotions and traits I associated with the way I felt at that time.
The layers of my mask design acted as a sort of reverse order from the reality, with a base coat of stone textured paint over a blank expression to hide and cover the true face, and the emotions displayed proudly over the top for all to see.
Red lips for love and passion, fire pouring out and up from the eye sockets for the seething anger building within, a single tear from one corner of a socket for a deep sadness I held since childhood– blue, like my own eyes.
Finally, I glued coins over the eyes for death, and wild yellow yarn hair for vibrant life.
Yes, I had both a edgy goth obsession with death, and bleached blond spiky hair… because it was the early 2000’s.
Why This Design?
or
Hey, I Bet You Want My Whole Life Story
This is going to be a lot, but if you can keep up, I swear this gives insight into what is behind my design choices.
Sadness With a Smile
When I was a little kid– I must have been only four or five years old, because I remember waiting for my brother to come home from school– I used to love going outside to walk in the rain and jump in the puddles that collected at the edge of the road that ran through our small hideaway town.
This is always interesting for me to talk about, because it undoubtedly conjures images in your head of a happy little kid twirling and splashing around, but that wasn’t my way.
For some reason I’ve never really understood, I enjoyed a somber and melancholic stroll, looking up at the grey sky through the cold drops of water while embraced by deep thoughts of existential sadness. I remember smiling at the clouds, eyes closed, tears blending with the rain on my face as a tight knot warmed in my belly.
I don’t remember thinking about anything specific that brought this on, it was just sort of… a general feeling that I didn’t question.
Although I am very pro-therapy and believe it useful for anyone’s every-day mental health, I’ve never gone myself. I feel like I could have learned something from these stories a lot earlier in life if I had.
I think I tell this story now as an early example that I’ve always had a very personal connection to my feelings, and I even bask in the negative ones as a part of the human experience I find enjoyable.
Despite one instance where I was legitimately depressed, I acknowledge how lucky and privileged I am to be able to say that I don’t suffer from it. I recognize the difficulties in life for people who do, so I am in no way using my experience as a guide for how I think others should live. That’s not my place.
Learning & Fearing Anger
(cw: alcoholism, verbal/psychological/emotional abuse, violent outbursts)
I wasn’t really an angry child– if you ignore the Nintendo rage bursts and that one time I bit my brother’s arm way too hard– and I often credit that to growing up in a household where I would regularly lay awake at night listening to my dad shout at my mother over what must have been super important, life-or-death issues, like how maybe if he didn’t spend so much money on beer they could afford to buy decent beds for their children.
I don’t remember ever witnessing physical abuse, although I’m not confident it didn’t happen, but I do remember a couple very fun and normal occurrences like hearing my dad punch a massive dent in the heating unit in the living room.
Aside from the sudden outbursts and slamming of doors, he seemed to specialize in the psychological and emotional manipulation flavors of abuse, whether this was intentional or not. The details are fuzzy, but I’m quite clear on the tone and how he often made himself out to be the victim. It was never clear to me if his sobs were real or exaggerated for effect.
To be clear, it wasn’t all bad, and it was far from the worst upbringing I’ve heard stories about. I have plenty of good memories from that time and with my dad, but I grew up trying to be extremely averse to conflict and holding his anger as an example of what I wanted to avoid for myself at all costs.
This sounds like a good goal to have, but it’s also not healthy to repress feelings of anger that build up inside yourself until you burst or break down.
More on this particular issue later.
Heart in a Vice
(cw: sappy school kid romance)
The first time I fell in love was the same year I made the mask in English class. She was about two and a half years younger than me, and at that age this put me in a difficult situation.
Obviously, there is a difference between age gaps as an adult, and age gaps as a child. I didn’t feel like this was a big issue, and nobody around me seemed to either, but for my then step-dad it was a catastrophic, life-ruining event.
My brother and I got really into playing the tabletop game Mage Knight the year before– I still have a plastic grocery bag full of the bastards under my bed for some reason that I haven’t touched in years– and there was a local shop in town called Dolly’s (I believe the full name was Dolly’s Sports Cards & Memorabilia, but I’m not one hundred percent on that and spent an hour trying to find confirmation online from old newspaper sources to no avail) that had recently started holding competitions with the game, like they had done before with Magic: The Gathering.
Just a quick aside: Dolly was the owner, and she was an amazing woman we all loved around those parts. She put together these game tournaments in her shop to help give local nerdy kids like us something fun to do with our time. It was sad to lose her only a couple years later in 2003.
I’m going to sound really cheesy now and like I’m trying to describe my life as a sappy romance movie, but I kept getting distracted from my game matches by constantly glancing over at the girl behind the counter who was helping her grandma run the shop.
She had straight, black hair held with a black and orange Halloween printed handkerchief (if I’m remembering that detail correctly,) grey-blue eyes like mine, and cute little freckles in a line from under one eye to the other. Every time I looked at her, one of us would catch that we were both doing the same thing and do that bashful little half-trying-to-look-away thing. A few weeks went by like this, and I eventually started losing my games because I barely cared about playing anymore, just so I could go over and talk with her once I was out of the tournament.
I even won a special edition figure for being the most positive player, since I would lose with a smile on my face and never take it badly.
My parents thought it was cute, until they found out how old she was. My step dad literally forbade me from trying to continue talking with her, so I stopped going to Dolly’s and my interest in Mage Knight fell apart pretty quick.
I don’t remember exactly how it happened, but I think a mutual friend got the two of us in touch again the following year. Since we didn’t go to school in the same building, we started communicating through notes passed between friends–
Again, early 2000’s, I didn’t even have my first prepaid brick phone yet.
–and eventually would meet up after school for just a few minutes before needing to go our own ways. I even went to a football game so we could be together for a longer period of time, and I hate sports in general. I just had to find any excuse to see her without my step dad catching on.
Ultimately, his strict rules and watchful eye on everything I did made it impossible to continue our relationship in any way, and I was forced to let her go.
There’s more to this story that I’ll go into later, but the key for this point is that my first experience with falling in love and feeling that level of emotional depth and passion for another person was met with efforts to immediately hold that back and stamp it out.
Tattoo Design
In 2007 I was three years into an enlistment with the U.S. Navy and, as anyone with more than one tattoo could tell you, I was looking forward to getting my next one as soon as I had the money and time to set up an appointment.
At this time, I had been through a lot in the military and recently returned from a long deployment overseas, during which I did a lot of self-exploration and learned much about who I was and wanted to be.
I also discovered some internal difficulties that had finally solidified into parts of my identity, and it felt right to redesign and reinterpret my old emotional mask concept into a permanent fixture on my body.
The stone of the mask is now cracked in places, worn down by the years of use and weariness of its purpose. The fire not only pours from the eye sockets, but also leaks out through the gaps and from behind. The blue tear is smaller. The clown-face makeup is black. The coins over the eyes are crude, ancient Greek drachmae, and the hair is gone.
The lips are still red and bright as the flames, but there are stitches tightly sewn across the mouth. This last detail was added by my tattoo artist and fit with the rest of the design and my personal meaning more than I even knew at the time.
When I get tattoos, part of my process is that I like the artist to add their own touch to the design. I want it to be a collaborative piece of art based on my idea, not just a direct copy of what I come up with.
Why The Changes?
or
You’re an Adult, You Probably Want the Hard Stuff
Tightening the Vice
(cw: more sappy school kid romance, parental psychological manipulation)
Due to my birthday being at the end of August, I was always the youngest one in my grade, so I was seventeen years old in my high school Senior year. She was a Freshman that year, so we were finally in the same building.
Grades twelve and nine, respectively.
We started talking and hanging out again, and since we could now see each other throughout the day, we made our relationship official. We spent every moment we could together when our schedule allowed.
My step dad may or may not have known the extent of our relationship, but he knew that I wasn’t being honest with him, and he knew that I had the desire and ability to see her behind his back.
By the time I had my own car at the end of the school year, it would seem I had more freedom to start seeing her on our own terms.
The thing to know about my step dad is that he was a great influence in raising me, and my relationship with him was positive most of my life, but when I crossed him I learned that he had a strong need to be in control.
When I was in trouble, I wouldn’t just get grounded with a lecture. I was made to stand upright in front of him while he talked at me incessantly about the problems with my attitude and behavior, often up to multiple hours straight. He would sit in a chair, or even leave the room to get food or a drink or whatever, and I was to stay standing in place, waiting for him to continue the shaming session.
Early on, this method of punishment would make me cry. I was pretty emotionally soft, and it made me sad for someone to be disappointed or upset with me. By the end, my face would be streaked with dried tears that I had been too scared to wipe away, and I had an internal eagerness to win back his love and respect.
I got used to it.
The tears didn’t come anymore. Sadness was replaced by resentment. His voice would become a distant drone in the back of my mind as I tried to shift my weight to avoid passing out.
The main effect this had on me probably wasn’t what he intended; it just made me desensitized and bored out of my mind, zoning out on tiny little details of his face until the world faded into a narrow vignette bordering my tunnel vision. My thoughts would wander to anything and everything. I didn’t really pay attention because I had heard it all before, and I was familiar with the cues that signaled my required responses– insincere, noncommittal, canned.
When he would finally dismiss me to my room, like some kind of soldier– no, he was never in the military– I was mentally worn out, exhausted and empty, legs tired and aching.
If I was alone, I just needed to lay down or distract myself playing video games. If I had friends over, I would return to them in silence that extended until I could emerge from the brain fog enough to enjoy their company again, waving away their concerned looks with “yeah, whatever, I’m used to it.”
I’m only now realizing that this may have been the start of something I’ll get into later, regarding my difficulties with feeling emotions.
When I had the freedom of my own car, he had to adjust his controlling influence. Since he’s the one who gave me the car as a gift, he wasted no time making sure I knew he could take it away from me at any moment whenever I stepped out of line. When I kept out of trouble, he told me that he knew people all over town that would tell him if I was seen out anywhere with my girlfriend (he didn’t call her that, because I wasn’t allowed to be dating her.)
I believed him, because I had lived with him long enough to know that he wasn’t lying about knowing damn near everybody. So I went about my life like I was in some kind of panopticon, trying to find ways of seeing the girl I loved without potential spies finding out. The paranoia this instilled in me was very real, and it made emotional vulnerability difficult to be comfortable with.
The last straw was when I decided I would go to her house after work when it was snowing. I drove-slid across icy roads with unprepared tires a half an hour through and out of town to get there, just to spend an hour or two with her.
My step dad had called my work to check up on me and found out I had already left, so he called my cell phone.
Yes, I finally had a shitty little blocky phone that I could play Snake on.
I didn’t care about lying to him, so I answered and told him exactly where I was. To my surprise, he didn’t freak out at me. He told me to be careful driving, to give him a call if I needed help, and we would talk about this when I got home.
As it turned out, he came to the conclusion that if I was willing to put my life and safety at risk to see her without telling him where I was, it was a better idea overall to allow me to see her. I was ecstatic, and I told her as soon as I got the chance.
We planned an actual date to go see a movie. My step dad gave me a ride to the theater, because he still didn’t trust me and had to have the control to know her and I wouldn’t just run off together.
I was so excited to finally be able to be with my girlfriend, who I was deeply in love with, without feeling that unsettling notion of being watched.
Before we even went into the movie, she broke up with me.
I don’t blame her, and I understand. I don’t think I ever fully understood why this happened, but I’m sure I wasn’t the easiest person to be with, especially at that time and in those circumstances.
But I was crushed, and my heart was broken for the first time.
My step dad displayed sympathy for me, but I don’t think I ever believed it was genuine.
Killing the Soul
(cw: military life, psychological manipulation, heartbreak)
I don’t believe in a soul, but I sometimes use the terms “soul” or “spirit” to refer to the personal emotional core.
I’m sure most people have a general understanding of this, but the purpose of Basic Training (commonly known as Boot Camp) is to break you down as a person and build you back into a member of the military. You are reduced to a baby, stripped of your bodily autonomy, and literally retaught how to stand, walk, speak, eat, write, dress, work, and interact with other people.
I had it easy. The elements of Basic that people struggle with the most were all too similar to the life I was already adapted to: standing at attention while some asshole points his finger in your face and makes you feel small? Check. Obsessively expecting obedience to a rigid set of rules and commands? Check. Treating the smallest mistake or slight as a life-shattering disaster you can never recover from? Checkity-check-check.
I’ve always had pride in my ability to adapt to any situation in life, and I thought that I did a good job keeping myself intact underneath all the military conditioning.
The extent of the negative effects inside wouldn’t be clear to me for many years after leaving the service.
Lots of interesting life experiences filled those first couple years. Basic wasn’t too bad for me. I did well, and there was even some fun to be had throughout the process. Great Lakes Illinois is fucking freezing in the winter, and I luckily got out of there before the worst of the weather hit.
My A-School was in Pensacola, Florida. The weather there was nuts in the winter. We would get sudden torrential bursts of freezing rain and wind that would die out just as fast. That was the first time I understood on a visceral level what it meant for the cold to cut to the bone.
I got kicked out of my A-School halfway through–
A story for another time.
–and ended up stationed on a ship out of San Diego, California as an Undesignated Seaman.
Ha, ha, I know it’s funny that Sailors are referred to as Seamen. Undesignated means I had no specific job, so I did shit deck work sweeping, cleaning, chipping rust, and painting.
I made friends, got yelled at, learned some cool skills, received a lower back injury that would never go away, and discovered that my favorite thing during my entire time in the Navy was staring off the side of the ship in the middle of the night at the bio-luminescent algae tumbling around in our wake when we were so far out to sea that there was no land in sight.
That, and the time we brought a team onboard who’s job was training dolphins to detect mines. It was cool to look down into our well-deck and watch them in their big water tanks.
But even through the excitement and positive experiences, daily life and the core structure of the military is pretty soul-crushing in itself. I had lots of ups and downs, made many attempts to reach out and really connect with other people, but as it wore on I felt that part of myself slipping away.
I had a long-distance girlfriend for a while that I went to visit a few times when I was able to take leave, but that came to a rocky end with bitterness and pain.
In 2006, two years into my enlistment, I got in touch with my first love again.
How we started talking again is kind of fuzzy. Was it through Facebook? I think I had already abandoned MySpace by then, so that would make sense…
The second I heard from her, my heart jumped in my chest. No matter where my life went without her, I think there was always a place in my soul that remembered her with that same fondness.
If I’m being honest, that little flutter is still there. We’ve both moved on and built lives we’re happy with, but I don’t think that will ever go away, nor do I think it needs to.
I didn’t want to get ahead of myself. She had a boyfriend, so we were reconnecting as friends, but I secretly wished that we still had a chance to be together.
The next time I went back home on leave, I saw her in person again. That old, intense spark was still there.
Our long-distance friendship continued, and there were times when the conversation would turn toward her unhappiness with her relationship.
I choose not to get into details, or even speculate on my assumptions. I recognize that I only have my own perceptions to go off of, and without being on the other side it’s impossible to know or understand her position at this time.
With no way to truly know if she felt the same in return, I opened up to her, admitted the extent of my feelings, and voiced my desire to further pursue a relationship with her, if that was something she wanted.
She turned me down and made it clear that this would never change.
It felt like the final nail in a coffin that I didn’t want to admit had been built.
I want to be clear on something. I’ve known too many guys who went through experiences where they felt similar to this, and they responded with an anger and internal sense of betrayal that seemingly manifested as a hatred toward women. I may not have always acted in the best way, but I have never held this kind of resentment or apathy. I don’t blame her for her decisions. I know she didn’t intend to hurt me. I am not owed affection, relationships, or love. Other people are not side characters in our story, so don’t treat them like they are.
Donning the Mask
(cw: heartbreak, depression)
The only time in my life I can say I’ve actually been depressed was following that moment, when I felt like I finally lost that piece of my soul for good.
For some reason, I decided to have that conversation on the last day before we were heading out on a planned six-month deployment overseas– because I was an idiot.
Maybe I was the Scarecrow, after all…
Interlude – Tin Man
Back to high school.
I don’t actually remember when it was, but I feel like it may have been Senior year. My best friend and I were screwing around in class during a period of downtime, talking in a small group with some other friends.
Unsure of why I was thinking of The Wizard of Oz, I slipped in a casual remark referring to him as the Scarecrow, for having no brains– really just a playful way to call him a dumbass for something he said or did.
Without missing a beat, he snapped a look directly at me and said: “Wow! Fucking Tin Man.”
It was a simple, but quick witted response to throw my own reference back at me, using it to call me heartless for the insult to his intelligence.
For some reason, this small moment of friendly ribbing stuck with me. Years later, it resurfaced in my mind as a metaphorical moniker I would use for myself to symbolize a developed inability to feel or express emotions, other than cold detachment or anger.
End Interlude
I felt empty. There was a constant ache deep inside that I couldn’t settle. I floated through a couple days, trying to busy myself with my work. It felt like I was lost, acting on autopilot from muscle memory.
Then it hit me.
Somehow it all caught up to me at once, and I crashed. I stopped talking, first giving noncommittal gestures and grunts in response to people, then retreating into myself entirely. I avoided eye contact, spaced out or stared at the floor for long stretches of time, and refused to acknowledge the presence or words of anybody who tried to interact with me.
I didn’t care, and I couldn’t find a reason to try.
My superiors yelled at me a lot during this time. I expect they thought that I was being obstinate when they would give me orders and I wouldn’t move from where I was sitting or look at them. I don’t even know why I didn’t end up in more trouble than I did. I think I had friends that made some convincing excuses for me.
A ship in the middle of the ocean is a dangerous place for someone to be depressed, but I luckily wasn’t suicidal. I think that would take a level of agency that I just didn’t have in me. I want to say I felt like a ghost, but the reality was even less than that. As far as I was concerned, I no longer existed.
All right, I know this all sounds super dramatic and probably an overreaction. Don’t worry, I’m almost done with this part.
I don’t know that I can explain it any better, but it was deeply important to me, and the impact was very real.
I honestly have no idea how long this lasted. It took a couple days to build to the crash, and I know I was silent for a few days. When the spell started to wear off, it happened gradually over the course of another few days.
Seems the whole process took maybe a full week, maybe a week and a half before I was back to what you could call normal.
This was the first time since creating the paper mache mask in English class in eleventh grade that the concept returned to my mind. I think I can even credit the symbol as the tool I used to climb out of my depression.
Again, I understand that what works for me (if you can call this working) won’t be the same for others, especially people who deal with depression on a regular basis. Everyone has their own battles to fight.
I’m not sure this was the most healthy way to go about it, but I imagined donning the stone mask to cover up my damaged emotions. The idea in my mind was that I needed time to heal inside, and I would fake being okay and happy on the outside in order to protect my vulnerability.
Leaking Fire
(cw: repressed anger)
My ship was an interesting one that I like to refer to as a taxi for Marines. We had about four-hundred-some crew onboard, and when heading on deployment we would load up about five-hundred or so Marines, along with their trucks, a couple landing craft boats, and maybe a hovercraft vehicles or two.
Our mission was to take the Marines where they needed to go. In this case, we were to bring them to the Persian Gulf and drop them off in Kuwait. Then we would go take on other tasks around the Pacific until they were ready to be picked back up.
A typical Naval deployment at the time was about four to six months away from home, so that’s what we were all mentally preparing for.
Some time after unloading our Marine detachment, toward the end of the work shift on an otherwise normal day, I was out sweeping the deck at the side of the ship with a few of the others when we heard an announcement.
The Captain broke the news to us all that our deployment would be extended.
Now, we had already found out that we would be doing the full six-month tour. It sucked to hear, but we were prepared for that eventuality.
As we neared the fifth month, we were notified that we would be extended an extra month, because the Marines wanted to stay inland for more operations.
This time, we were already six and a half months out. The stress and anticipation to get the fuck off the water and return home to stability and family had us all on edge.
The second we heard the speaker come to life, we were wound tighter than guitar string. Before he even finished his statement, we lost our collective shit.
A few of us screamed and swore. Those of us carrying brooms slammed them into the side of the ship to break them in half, then threw the pieces over the side. Even our division head knew not to give us any shit for not finishing our cleanup task.
I was furious. So much frustration and pain and stress had built up over the months. My skin had burned so often from working out on the decks in the sweltering heat that I had a constant tan multiple shades darker than my natural tone, and I had contracted a permanent skin condition. I functioned on a consistent revolving influx of coffee all throughout my day and sleeping pills at night. I had developed a case of athlete’s foot that hasn’t fully gone away to this day. We spent so much time in the middle of nowhere on the ocean that it went from being a beautiful sight I loved to look at, to a desert we couldn’t escape from that fucked with my mental perception of space and movement.
One time, I had a friend on the ship punch me in the face so I could have a black eye. I dunno, I never really had one before, seemed like a thing to do.
Once, while trying to drag my drunk ass friend into his bunk, one of the guys knocked me over and stomped on my crotch… because he felt like it, I guess.
I was getting pretty tired of the guy who never bathed and insisted that he had a dragon friend watching over us, flying just at the edge of the horizon line.
And why the fuck did somebody steal my dirty clothes out of the laundry room before I could even put them in the washing machine!?
My approach was always to not stand out, to do my job and not bring attention to myself, to hold back my stress and anger so I didn’t disturb the environment around me.
This is an unhealthy approach for this exact reason.
This was the first moment my mask began to crack, like a release valve straining under the pressure of the heat building within the pipes.
The explosive outburst and breaking of the cleaning materials felt good, but it wasn’t enough. The embers inside were too hot.
Breaking the Stone
(cw: alcohol abuse, sex, prostitution)
Along with my decision to eschew emotional vulnerability, I figured the deployment was a great opportunity to try on some behaviors and mindsets that differed greatly from how I lived my life to that point, just to see how they fit. Maybe I could discover something about who I was and who I wanted to be.
Doing these things simultaneously probably wasn’t the best idea, but they worked hand-in-hand very well.
The ship would go anywhere from a week to forty-five days straight at sea before pulling into port. There were instances where I would go to some event or do some minor sightseeing, but more often than not, as soon as I was able to go ashore, friends and I would head directly to a bar or restaurant where we could start drinking.
It wasn’t unusual to start drinking hard liquor at ten in the morning, and not stop until late into the night when we had to head back.
Plenty of days were spent working on the decks with a massive hangover, covering for each other when we would sleep in after blacking out the night before.
I saw a number of foreign countries primarily through the twisting, blurred vision of bars and the dark streets between them.
The moment I realized that I had been drinking way too much was during one night in Singapore. We started drinking shots of tequila at around nine in the morning, and everywhere we went we would get more tequila, ending the night at a bar that sold big platters full of tequila shots for one-hundred dollars per plate.
Basically, I realized the next day that all I drank was straight tequila all day long and somehow still remembered the whole time without blacking out. My tolerance was fucking through the roof, so I took that as a cue to start settling down.
Don’t get me wrong, I had fun. The memories I have are often of interactions and connections with the people in these countries, which I think is pretty cool. But I do think it would have been nice to experience more of the interesting cultural sights and activities available.
I did get to ride a camel in Dubai at a market in the middle of the desert, help with rebuilding a school in the Philippines, visit the Sentosa Butterfly Park & Insect Kingdom in Singapore, and swim with turtles in Hawaii.
Originally, I planned to save some money throughout the deployment as well, since most of that time we were paid tax-free, but I saved exactly zero.
Between food, alcohol, cab fare, and a few miscellaneous expenses like massage parlors, even the money I accumulated while at sea was gone in no time at all.
I’ve never been someone who had one-night stands or meaningless sex. I was always a bit of a sappy romantic, preferred to be in a relationship with the one person I was into at the time, and valued meaningful intimate connections over purely physical interactions.
So, I went against that too.
I wanted to be like the guys around me who could just go out and have fun. It seemed like if I didn’t care so much, I could enjoy myself more and get out of my head, stop being quiet and shy like I always had been.
For the most part, that didn’t work out like I expected. It didn’t come naturally to me, but I tried.
I went to a massage parlor in Dubai, where I discovered they gave “happy endings” (seriously, I didn’t know beforehand.) Visited three very different brothels in Australia, two of which I used the services of (one I used twice, because the lady I saw both times was very sweet, and I would lay with her and give her a back massage.)
The wildest place I went was a big shopping mall building in Singapore with bars instead of stores. There were multiple sex workers at each bar who’s purpose was to entice you to spend money there so they could receive a portion of the profit.
Because I couldn’t fight my nature of wanting meaningful interactions, no matter how much I tried, I ended up coming to this place for my last three nights there to spend time with one particular woman I enjoyed the company of.
We had a lot of fun. I bought multiple rounds of tequila, at one-hundred dollars per tray full of shots. We shared drinks, talked about our lives and families, danced half-naked on top of the bar, and had sex.
On my last night there, she cried.
I sat with her outside and consoled her the best I could.
I felt bad.
At that point in my life, I didn’t have the perspective and knowledge I would acquire later in life about the sex industry, especially in that part of the world. But we had talked enough that I knew what her situation was, and it wasn’t fair.
A lot of the girls at that place were in a similar position. She came there from the Philippines due to limited employment prospects. The pay she received wasn’t great, and sailors pulling into port were a welcome opportunity, because they came in groups and spent a lot of money.
Most of her money she sent back home to help her parents.
I don’t know if she was upset about me leaving because she enjoyed spending time with me in a situation where that was rare, or if it was because I provided her with more income than she regularly received, but it doesn’t matter either way to how I feel about that moment.
I’m pretty sure that was when the mask broke.
Sometimes I still think about her and wonder how she’s doing. I hope she’s okay.
My New Face
By the time I got back from deployment, I knew that living with the mask on wasn’t what I wanted. It made me lean towards callousness, and I didn’t like that. It wasn’t me, not who I wanted to be.
I wanted to experience my emotions honestly and accept the way it made me feel, find some way to work through them without hiding or running away.
At this point, I had two tattoos already, one from my time in Florida, one from Hawaii at the very beginning of our deployment.
I designed the mask to act as a reminder of what I didn’t want to be, and as a symbol of taking it off my face and wearing it instead on my sleeve. A way to keep an honest display of my journey out in the open.
Okay, it had to be above the sleeve line as military guideline, but the concept still holds and it shows out of most shirts.
My redesign of the image showed the fragility and inauthenticity of the mask, broken and entirely unable to contain the fire. But the happiness and life of the clown makeup was black and dead, the tear small and barely noticeable, and the stitches were holding back my capacity for love.
I came to realize that I couldn’t remove the mask from my face after all. It was like I not only forgot how to express real emotion for others, but how to feel it myself. I made light of it by referring to myself as a robot, but the notion that I had become empty and heartless wasn’t a joke.
I remembered the Tin Man.
Tattoo Reinterpretation
I left the Navy in December of 2008. A lot of life has happened between then and when I’m writing this in December of 2022. However, I have gone through some major changes within myself and acknowledged some important realizations.
The entire original purpose for writing this post was that I felt I had to go through and reinterpret all of my tattoo pieces within the new context of my life.
After all, these are permanent works of art that I love dearly, and each and every part of them is important to me, as a road map of my personal journey as well as a symbol of who I am today.
So, let’s finally get into it!
What’s New?
or
I Can’t Believe You Still Want More
About halfway through this year, 2022, I came out to myself as a transgender woman.
Whoa! Bomb dropped, huh? I bet you didn’t see that coming, unless you know anything about me right now. I’m not exactly hiding it…
My transition has been great, and I’m happier now than I ever have been before. I started thinking about the idea for this post because I realized that I’ve been looking back at my life through different eyes, so to speak.
I always thought of myself as a pretty average, straight, cisgender man. Certain elements of my life and upbringing never felt quite right, but I always thought that I didn’t have any other option and just had to play the cards I was dealt.
Ever since I decided, fuck that, I’m going to become who I want to be, and live my life in the way that is most comfortable and natural to me, parts of my life have come into focus as obvious signposts to me of my being trans and needing to head towards this current change.
My tattoos are a part of that, and I have been thinking about what they mean to me now. As a map of my path through life, the previous interpretations all still hold true, but with this new, added layer of complexity.
Feminine Expression
Throughout my life, I have run into key events that caused me to intentionally shift my behavior away from what came naturally to me, in order to attempt fitting into an expected societal mold that came along with being assigned “boy” at birth.
You’ll notice that some of these are ridiculous, but that’s the nature of our socialized concepts of gender expression.
My voice has always tended toward a higher pitch. As a kid, I remember my dad and brother mocking me for sounding like Mickey Mouse. Often I would become quiet and choose to speak less out of embarrassment.
I’m aware that children often have high voices, but this is to illustrate the start of a particular trend that made an impact on me.
Later on, in high school, I sang along with a song and was told that my pitch was too high. I was already self-conscious about this, but it took years to sing in front of anyone again.
I began to make a conscious effort to lower the pitch of my voice when speaking.
One of my friends told me that the way I placed my feet when I stood was feminine and made me seem gay.
I took his notes to spread my feet apart and point my toes slightly outward.
When I first got to my ship in the Navy, I had a back injury that caused me to walk differently. I had to keep my posture straight and not take long strides, in order to avoid painful tugging sensations through the nerves.
People on the ship called me Sugar Cookie as a nickname behind my back. When I finally found out, I also discovered it was because they thought I was gay and feminine due to the way I walked and carried myself.
As an adult, after the Navy, I received a comment that someone mistook me for a woman when they heard me speak before seeing me.
My efforts to lower my voice doubled to achieve a deeper, more masculine tone.
In addition to those times I responded to the perceptions of others, there were broader cultural norms that caused internal struggles when I would convince myself I felt different because I believed I should.
I made a constant joke of an aversion to glitter because it spread like a virus that you could never fully wash off, even though I secretly liked when people would put it on me in an effort to get on my nerves.
I quietly longed for those few moments when a girl would want to paint my nails because they thought it was cute to do to a boy.
Adults around me used to joke about most of my friends being girls–
Inappropriate stuff, looking back now, about having a harem of girlfriends…
–but I just enjoyed their company more than boys because I could more easily relate to them.
I was never one of those kids who tried wearing their mom’s shoes or clothes, so I didn’t know how good dresses and high-heels felt for me to wear until the first time I put on a skirt just a few years ago.
My girlfriend at the time was away on a trip, and something compelled me to put on one of her skirts.
I wore it around the house all day.
It was so comfortable and natural, but at the end of the day I put it away and felt like I had done something I wasn’t supposed to do, so I didn’t do it again until a few years passed and we had parted ways.
During that time, my mind would often return to the desire to wear a skirt again.
When that relationship ended, I had a space to consider and explore my identity that I unknowingly didn’t believe I had before.
One of the most eye-opening moments for me was when I saw an online streamer tell the trans people in their audience that cisgender people don’t have a tendency to lay awake at night feeling sad that they weren’t born the opposite gender.
That was me, as far back as five years old. I thought that was just a thing people felt sometimes.
For so long I took perceptions of feminine expression in my behavior as a negative, something to avoid and work to correct. I’m fully aware of the larger picture of problematic mentality this tends to say about our culture in general, but I finally reached a point where I have worked to reverse the damage done to myself through these moments and expectations.
What I find interesting is the realization that the mask I designed to display prominently on my arm very much looks more like a feminine form than a masculine one.
I have come to think of this as a representation of the way I used to cover up my femininity, the stitches across the mouth silencing the woman underneath.
Despite these shackles, my true self kept showing through regardless.
It’s part of who I am, and it can’t be hidden or contained.
Understanding Acceptance
My emotional issues went on to create all kinds of problems for me.
I had trouble being able to express real love for my girlfriend that I spent eleven years of my life with. I worked against my own interests and desires because I couldn’t break free from the fear and uncertainty that smoldered somewhere deep beneath my surface.
I had taken on elements of that need for control, the emotional manipulation, and the explosive outbursts of rage that were planted in me so long ago, and I truly struggled to acknowledge my own faults that ate away at the very roots of our relationship until it was too late to properly undo the damage done.
It took a long time to recognize what needed to change, and a long time of self-reflection and understanding to find a way of getting better, but I managed to make it work.
I reached a point where I was at peace, for lack of a better term. I was happy and accepting of who I was and how I had gotten there.
Being in this place is what allowed me to explore my identity in new ways and discover who I was truly meant to become.
It’s kind of funny to me that when I reached personal acceptance as a man, I gained the ability to find myself as a woman.
If I have now finally been able to remove the mask for good– and I think I have– then I look at the tattoo not as a representation of my current emotional state that I’ve been trapped within, but as a symbol of that part of my struggle that I worked so hard to free myself from, placed on my sleeve where it was always intended.
The flames, the tiny tear, the caged love and passion, the silenced voice, they all came off with the stone. The coins over the eyes are doing their job and putting that face to rest. The black clown makeup shows that I can look at even the darkest parts of my past with a positive view, choosing to learn and grow.
Emotions that pushed against bondage are free. The fire doesn’t burn anymore. Tears flow more freely when needed. I give and receive love that flutters deep in the place I used to think empty. I am genuinely happy.
My stone mask tattoo has been recontextualized as a mural of a battle I no longer need to fight.