On my left forearm is a small tattoo, just four square inches, in white ink, barely noticeable. The heart made up of angel wings may seem to the few random people who have noticed it to simply be a pretty symbol, a cliché even… the white ink mark of my basic-ness.
For those who know me, however, they know that this small, seemingly insignificant tattoo is actually the tiny physical sign of the biggest scars I have. These angel wings are there to remind me of the constant presence of those I have lost forever. The wings are folded into a heart, so I can imagine the wings folded over me, because when I am desperate to call someone for help, some of the top choices are now gone forever.
Six years ago when I was 15 years old, a nurse looked across my father’s bed at me and asked if I wanted to reverse the Do Not Resuscitate order my aunt had signed just hours before. She asked if I had taken biology and explained that every organ responsible for filtering the toxins out of my father’s body had failed, leaving his body filling with too much poison for him to recover. After only a week in the hospital, one week after he had been laughing with his friends when he started coughing up blood, my father was dying. Just three days after Thanksgiving, I had to be even more grateful for the 15 years I had with my father, because I would not be gifted a day more. I gathered with his friends and prayed over him, but while they prayed that he would get better, continually insisting that they’d “get a doctor, he’d give you a shot, and you’ll walk out of here,” I begged God to take pity on me, to please not make me go through this.
Unfortunately, none of those prayers were answered. Just a month after my fifteenth birthday, I held my father’s hand as his heart stopped. I silently screamed at the doctor who came in merely to call the time of death, refusing to do anything to save him, and then I crumpled as my cousin came to hug me and I silently sobbed, unable to make a sound now that my father, my great pretender, had been officially deemed deceased. Today, six years later, I still struggle to find words to explain the ultimate wrenching of my heart that day. The pain was so incredibly deep that I was nearly completely numb for months afterwards. The girl who had always seen the world in black and white now moved through a world of muted grays, which I still cannot sift through. I stopped taking pictures, which eternally reminds me of him, as he was the one who taught me how to focus a camera and about the beauty of a sunrise over the beach. For the next four months, my entire life passed by in a fog, with no real clarity until the day yearbook applications for photographers were announced. It was like I heard my dad guiding me to the yearbook room that day, picking up the application for me, and telling me I could do this.
Applying for that position was the first time I felt that I might be okay. How fitting then, that a photography job more than three years later would pay for the tattoo I got in his honor. I do not intend to be an artist as my day job; I am far too practical to be able to rely on the sporadic income I have found as an artist. But the opportunities I get to work as a photographer are nearly always a gift, offered at the least convenient times, often logistically wrong just like the presents my dad used to buy me, which were either the wrong size or the wrong style, or occasionally one of each… these photography jobs come with his signature hidden underneath, and each time I get an offer, just like each time I reach a big milestone (like applying for graduation this week), I am desperate to call him. But since I don’t have a phone to reach him, I settle for knowing he is watching, looking at my arm for the reminder that he cares.
To the unfamiliar eye, my tattoo looks like a cliché cultural symbol with no meaning. In reality, it is anything but.
