Last summer, I worked as a kayak guide on Pictured Rocks in Munising. Most days I spent 6+ hours on Lake Superior with strangers who made uncomfortable small talk while waiting to use the bathroom. Usually it was something about how many times they’d kayaked before, or that they didn’t know how to swim— the two can be mutually exclusive.
Before a tour on an oddly hot day in July, I left my dry bag at the top of the stairs that led down to the beach. As I was preparing a kayak on shore, my manager yelled, “do you want your bag?” I told him I didn’t and that it would be there when I got back.
Inside that bag was $200 to be spent on a tattoo the next day. I didn’t have any tattoos– I still don’t– but I wanted one, so I made an appointment with an artist I did not know for a design I had not seen. All that was given to the tattooist was a rough sketch of a plant I decided was inseparable from my identity and needed to be on my body forever.
My parents hate tattoos– I love my parents. That said, I walked into New Age and made an appointment for July 12. I understand why my parents hate tattoos. It’s the same reason they hated it when I used a Sharpie to write my name on a seatbelt when I was six. It’s permanent, it’s “ugly,” it doesn’t fit. It’s not the original, as my body was intended to be.
My body was theirs when I was born. It was theirs until I could drive, and even then, I was only allowed a part of myself. That part was still theirs because it did not know how to think, feel, or decide for itself. And while I am sure that if I were to have a child, I would consider what is theirs to be mine, it is still a horrible thing to not be your own.
Yet at the end of each 1:00 shift, when I schlepped 200 piss-filled kayaks up a seventy-foot staircase, when my limbs were numb and my stomach was empty, and when two boats were all that was left on the beach, I would stop and watch the sunset over Grand Island with the certainty that my body was mine. Each burnt layer of skin when it peeled, each bruise and scab given by dropped boats. Even the blistered feet that were covered in a glaze of calluses.
So that night, when I looked in my bag on the van ride back to Marquette and saw that the $200 dollars was gone, I wasn’t sad. Sure, I was a little annoyed that I wouldn’t be able to drop 3 weeks’ worth of food on a lifetime of slights at family gatherings, but, more than that, I understood that I didn’t need a tattoo to prove that I was my own– to myself or my parents. What I needed was autonomy, the decisiveness that hides itself whenever there is more than one restaurant to choose from.
I might get a tattoo one day– I think they are beautiful– but I will not need one. You might decide otherwise, and if you do, I hope you don’t get robbed by a tourist.
