Let me be honest right off the top. I am not a big fan of tattoos. I love colour and I admire art. I believe people have the right to do as they choose with their own bodies. But I guess I just don’t appreciate people using their bodies as their canvas. Let’s call it my little hang up.
Similarly, you won’t find me drooling over body piercings, staplings or brandings. If you add to these, neck hoops to elongate the space between head and shoulders and lip discs to make the lower lip protrude farther than the shnoz, then you are entering the realm of “just plain weird.” Self-immolation is out of the question when it comes to options for what you can do to your body.
It’s virtually impossible to go anywhere on Salt Spring without having your visual senses hijacked by the myriad of tats out there. They come in all shapes, forms and colours. They may be delicate, intricate line drawings or giant, full-spectrum painted murals that can expand across an entire body. They can spell out the name of a first love such as Rosie, or place Mom inside a heart with an arrow through it. Tattoos are able to visually represent spiritual and meditative concepts like a Mandala or Om. Politically and philosophically, they can express beliefs and sentiments such as “arrest is good for a change” or ‘imagine whirled peas.” I once saw a Hell’s Angel biker who had tattooed across his back “If I wanted your opinion, I’d beat it out of you.”
I come by my unease with tattoos honestly. You see, my mother had a tattoo. It was on her left forearm. It wasn’t the name of an old boyfriend or a drawing of a unicorn. It was a number; 56128 to be specific. From that moment when the German SS gave her the tattoo in 1942 until the end of the war, she no longer had a name but only the number. Below the number was a small downward pointing equilateral triangle which represented half of a Star of David. This signified that she was a Jew.
She had been transported by cattle car from her home in a small town in Poland to the Auschwitz concentration camp, infamous for the German phrase on the sign on the front gate “Arbeit Macht Frei” which translates to “Work Shall Set You Free.” For the next three years she worked as slave labour sewing Nazi soldier uniforms or manufacturing munitions on an assembly line. The plan they had for her was to work her until she was too weak or sick, in which case she would be exterminated like the rest of her family who had been eliminated earlier in the war.
However, she did not die. She was liberated in early 1945 by Soviet forces, met and married my father (who had been interned in another concentration camp, Buchenwald, where they just executed humans without bothering to document and tattoo them) in a post-war camp for displaced people, gave birth to my sister and me, and seven years later immigrated to Canada.
Let me get back to my mother’s tattoo. When I was still young, I was shielded from the harsh reality of its origin. I just knew that when my parents hosted the weekly Saturday night card game, almost all the other adults, friends from the Old Country who had also survived the genocide, sported similar numbered tats on their arms. I naturally assumed that the tattoo was some kind of rite of adulthood. They showed that a person had reached some level of maturity and was now permitted to gamble dimes and quarters at games of poker and gin rummy.
As I aged a bit, I let my imagination take me to more mysterious and exotic explanations. Perhaps my mother and her gambling associates were part of a very exclusive club, no, a secret society, bent on world domination right from the kitchen table of our house. What if the numbers were covert codes which, like secret handshakes, revealed to insiders who could be trusted and who not? Maybe the numbers allowed you to connect to top-secret phone lines or acted as passwords to hidden Swiss bank accounts.
Eventually, I learned the truth about my mother’s tattoo. Although I must admit I felt a little disappointed that it was just the result of a Nazi bookkeeping perversion in human flesh, I accepted the situation stoically as my mother had done all those years earlier. I am not lying when I say that she used to play different combinations of the numerals in 56128 when she bought Lotto 649 tickets.
Maybe that explains my emotional response to tats. Maybe I need to chill. After all, in the not-too-distant future there may be no more need for needle-pricking tattoos at all. Technologies utilizing biofeedback and microchip implants in the brain could possibly recreate processes similar to what a chameleon does when it changes colour. Signals could convey images to nerve endings found in and between layers of the skin which would allow the body to become a projection screen. Essentially, you would become your own screen saver. There is no theoretical reason why these images could not be 3-D or in the form of holograms. Who’s to stop you from renting yourself out as a billboard?
Nobody asked me, but tats are becoming as commonplace here as Scotch broom growing along the roadside. Whereas there was a time when you could only find them on sailors and bikers, you would be hard-pressed today to find anyone over the age of 15 who hasn’t been inked at least once.
I’m not saying I would never consider getting a tat for myself. At my age and with the sum total of my wrinkles, I don’t think I would make a pretty sight. Nevertheless, I suppose I could follow in my mother’s footsteps and use the tat pragmatically. This way, I won’t always be forgetting that secret code password number that allows me into my offshore anonymous Swiss bank account.