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Learning to love yourself through tattoos
How tattoos have been used to reclaim bodies and minds
From tiny symbols to huge back-pieces, tattoos are beautiful. They decorate the skin of one in five of us and there’s a wide range of reasons that people get tattooed. Some tattoos are purely aesthetic but many provide another benefit to the person wearing them.
Tattoos can illustrate our positive aspects, from hometowns to favourites songs, but tattoos can also draw attention away from things that remind us of more negative things. Surgical scars are permanent reminders of scary life events and can be covered by tattoos. A common example is getting flowers over mastectomy scars. This makes it easier for people to appreciate a body part separately from the traumatic event that shaped it.
Some people choose to incorporate a scar into the tattoo design rather than try to hide it. By using the tattoo to add beauty to a difficult memory, the scar can pretend to be an intentional aspect of the body, rather than a necessary or accidental one.
I have no negative feelings about the scars on my body but I worry that surgery or an injury will slice open one of my tattoos, scarring my deliberate design with incidental lines. The opposite of this fear is the closest I can come to imagining how it feels to reclaim part…
