"Tattooing is an art, a sacred spiritual art, and unlike the art you hang on a wall, tattoo images on your body live along with you. They are active energy attractors because of their magnetized quality." - Lisa Barretta, Conscious Ink: The Hidden Meaning of Tattoos
For many reasons, after seventeen years of living cancer free with one breast (right side) and a mastectomy scar, I decided to lean into the possibility of a tattoo, as a work of art and, more importantly, as creative transformation and rebirth.
Many years ago, I wrote these simple lines about my new (post-mastectomy) “chest wall”:
I touch it and there is something missing,
my skin does not respond.
It is a surface for my fingers,
a wall to hang a picture on.
I can still feel the physical, psychological and emotional tension that was present when I wrote those words shortly after my left breast was removed; the tension of presence/absence, hope/despair, vitality (eros)/death, beauty/ugliness, sadness/joy, wholeness/brokenness, and finally, the ultimate triumph of creation, something born through the tension of those opposites. I also found myself greeting a more courageous acceptance of imperfection, of what it means to be simultaneously broken and whole.
I knew something would come. Something would be born.
(It might also be good to mention that my daughter was born as I was discovering the cancer.)
I looked into reconstruction but this was not a medical possibility for me because of the amount of radiation that I endured. Thankfully, over the years, nerve endings repaired and more sensations returned to the skin and surrounding area (my arm); my chest wall became more responsive, sensitive and alive! The radiation shadow receded a lot, as did almost all of the little, red capillaries.
Despite loving and caring for this self, and being deeply loved, I cannot deny, especially as an aging woman, the subtle erotic impact of having a mastectomy.
There is something energetically significant to asymmetry (one breastedness) that I don’t know how to describe or explain; but I know this subtle energy makes its way into my psyche, my personality development, my muscles, muscular patterns, postures, movements and sexuality.
It is this subtle energy, be it conscious or subconscious, physical or spiritual, or all of it, that I think a tattoo meets, changes, challenges, shifts.
They say that when a fire comes to a dry field, the field becomes more fertile, the grasses are more plush and the whole environment is more vital. Literally and figuratively, a tattoo is fire to the dry field. What other than fire could meet the impact of death, breast cancer, surgery and treatment?
In time, I will see how the tattoo changes me, how it shifts the subtle energy of asymmetry and the trauma of surgery and cancer; how, slowly but surely, the tattoo births something new and healing.
That’s why the image was so important to me. Daemon and Raven both listened to my ideas, saw the images that I loved and then zoned in on what was most salient. Daemon created a work of art that has powerful symbolic resonance for me, that reverberates physically, psychologically, emotionally, intuitively and instinctually -- through many aspects of being in ways that I cannot measure but feel is real and true.
I truly enjoyed the painful process of the tattoo. It felt like a sacred time. There is something pure to pain. It was an honest time. It was a reciprocal time where what was given was received and what was received was given in a mysterious unified way. Music. Conversation. Tea. A warm fire in the living room. Animals. Barns. Nourishing food. Fields of snow and clear skies full of stars. This is all a part of the tattoo, the energetic shift within.
It is a sacred time.
Thank you!!!
Anna