When I entered middle school, I drew on myself with Sharpies. Everyone I knew did. We drew the names and logos of favorite punk bands, expansive landscapes of trees and craggy seaside cliffs up and down arms, sloppy frowny or winky faces in three-color spread. I wrote public messages on my arms and secret messages to myself underneath my shirt or in the crevices below my thighs. (YOU’RE BEAUTIFUL at first, and then a wobbly-inked DON’T KILL YOURSELF for the whole long trudge of high school). When I started hooking up at the end of high school, I kept the sharpies on my arm and spittle-rubbed as many of the more hidden messages off with tongue-slicked fingers before I would let anyone see me.

Since then, the more I’ve gotten tattooed, the less and less I’ve written onto myself. The two are linked, two bodies sharing one bed: the bigger one gets, the less space the other has to claim. It’s like my body can only accommodate one set of secrets, one way of inscribing my ongoing efforts towards life in ink.

I got my first tattoo when I turned 21. I sketched it out beforehand, which I’ve done for all of my tattoos, bringing a drawing with me as I entered the studio. I inked my sketch over with Sharpie and photocopied the drawing to make it smaller, scaled it down to fit my arm. The artist traced directly over it, and in my bed that night, I ran my finger again and again over the raised, blistering red skin. “I love you,” I whispered. “You’re beautiful.”

I love the concealability of ink into flesh, the way with the right clothing they just disappear. (Every tattoo I have is large enough that, if I want to obscure them, I have to be geometric with the clothes I drape across my body.) I love the public meaning tattoos can have and how private and sometimes contradictory meanings hide underneath. Every tattoo I’ve gotten speaks a secret language of love towards my own body and the bodies of those like me. I get tattoos as a way of reminding myself that I’m still alive.

Some themes: branches. Sea life. Changes. As a child, I had dreams of giant squid floating alone in the cavernous darkness of the ocean. (I’m a Pisces.) As an adult, I fell in love with seahorses, who have gender-swapped pregnancies: a more explicit kind of gender transgression. All of my tattoos, I realize now, are about the body in transformation—whether that be a branch bursting into flower or a quiet transfeminine continuum, a further act of love. This is how I’m interested in speaking to the public parts of me: loudly but without a key so it becomes a private language too. There are so many women I love in this same way.

(A tattoo for me is a memory of something there and not there at the same time: a ghost. It’s a way to access the past but also imaging a larger past than the one I have.)

Before my mother met my father, she had a tattoo of a flower right about her hip. My father hated this tattoo with the intensity that he hated most things—and so, before I was born, she went to a shop and paid to have it removed. Instead of a tattoo above her hip, she then had a thick white-pink scar. 

I developed my own relationship with flowers—the dogwoods blooming throughout North Carolina as I fell in love with my home state for the first time, the bags of lavender passed out by the medic at the protest in 2012 we got kettled by riot cops at—but that first scar remained. It’s no coincidence to me that I got my flower tattoo after my father died, the grief and anger of it all raw and red.

I’ve stopped writing on myself, but only did so recently: I found other strategies of reminding myself the importance of my own life. But I was still Sharpieing words onto my stomach and the inner parts of me when I started getting tattooed. YOU’RE A WOMAN, my flesh said in 2016 when I brought in the woodcut of the wolf, standing on her hind legs under the moon. YOU’RE BEAUTIFUL, my flesh said, as the wolf wore for all the world what looked like a gaff or possibly just a pair of black panties like I wore, peasant houses thatched in the background and the moon full above and the ground bumping along under the wolf’s feet. I had come into my identities several times over by that point, but the words still seemed wobbly and inchoate to me, unsure of their own certitude.

The tattoos were sure, though; they always were. As the needle pierced my right thigh in the white-brick parlor and blood began daubing itself onto the ink above it, I saw a commitment to thriving, a beauty in myself that before I had only let live through illustration. Thank you, I said to the tattoo artist on the way out, my voice rough and low. I don’t even know if she heard me.

Then, I walked home. That evening, I showered, careful to not let the water touch my leg; the messages I inked onto myself slowly rubbed off. DON’T DIE, it said by my left tit; and then, DON’T; and then, just a watery DO. I watched the water swirl down the drain. I’ll never let my own tattoos be removed, I whispered, but that’s not really the point I’m making here. 

I toweled off instead, grabbed the lavender sachet under my pillow, texted my girlfriend. That summer we had ubered to Dead Horse Bay at sunset, watching the glass bottles lap along the shore as night embraced us. The moon was full. I was twenty-two. I sent her a quick snap of the wolf curling up my leg and flipped my phone over onto my pillow. Fall was already crisping the air, but that summer it had been muggy and miserable, and the brine dampening our legs was a relief. Don’t die, I whispered to myself, so low she couldn’t hear, and together we looked into the tumescent water—tattoos glowing in the moonlight, future unfurling, alive.

About the author

Zefyr Lisowski is a trans disabled poet, Pisces, and multidisciplinary artist. The recipient of fellowships from Tin House, Blue Mountain Center, and more, she is a poetry co-editor at Apogee Journal and the author of the short Lizzie Borden murder book Blood Box (Black Lawrence Press, 2019). She lives online at www.zeflisowski.com and in person in New York. Zefyr grew up in the Great Dismal Swamp, North Carolina.