A Little Later Than I Really Intended, Part II...

Tattoo number two.



I just got this one done in June of this year. As you should know from this.

Not too long after I got the elephant I realized I wanted another tattoo. I decided I wanted the words "never forget" on the right side of my ribcage, since the elephant is on the left. Originally I toyed with the idea of getting the text done in Italian or Latin, since I regularly sing in both those languages. But I didn't feel much of a connection with either language and was less and less satisfied with the idea every time I thought about it.

Last summer my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer for the third time. Each time was a different kind of cancer, starting with prostate nearly 20 years ago. It was by some feat of grace or magic that he lived as long as he did.

A few days after his ninetieth birthday I was in Santa Cruz for Oose's birthday. I had an eye infection issue and had to wear an eyepatch under my glasses all day. We also had to take a windy road up to a lake in the mountains and I get carsick. So I almost yacked in the car. Which pretty much would have completed my day. Luckily for everyone, that didn't happen. Barely.

I woke up early on Saturday because my eye was swollen and hurt from driving most of the day before. I slept on the couch with an ice pack for a while, but not very soundly. I couldn't get comfortable. I was in pain and I had had a funny feeling all morning.

My brother started texting me to see if I was up. Then he called without warning. As soon as his name popped up on my phone screen I knew what he was going to tell me. My grandfather had passed away sometime around four that morning. After being bed-ridden and drugged up on morphine for a couple weeks. He held on until he knew they were going to take him to the hospital, then he just left in his sleep.

My dad's side of my family is Cherokee. Very Cherokee and very proud of it. As we should be. Some of my friends helped me form a quartet (group of four singers) to sing a couple things at my grandfathers funeral and one of the pieces my dad requested we do was Amazing Grace. For some reason my old Methodist hymnal includes a verse of Amazing Grace in Cherokee, so I decided we had to sing it, which was really pretty much perfect.

After that I started looking at actual Cherokee words and the language just looks beautiful on paper. So I decided to go with my heritage. That's what the lettering is. Cherokee. To remind me that I am a strong, capable woman and that I should never forget everything I went through to get to the place I'm in today. I should never (despite how much I desperately want to) forget Bambi. Never forget everything we went through with and for each other. All the things we did to each other. Never forget what it means to love someone and be completely loved, but still not be able to functionably be together.


My dad had an especially hard time with the death of his father. And I thought more and more about how hard it would be on me if I lost him. Since my other tattoo came from my relationship with my mom, I wanted something representative of the relationship I have with my father.


My neighbors when I was a kid always called my him Chief Two-Feathers. They even made a sign to hang in our driveway that said "Two-Feathers Reservation". Obviously I wanted to incorporated the Two-Feathers idea. Initially I wanted a dream catcher in the middle of my back, but the closer it got to my appointment date the less connected I felt with that idea.

About four days before I went in to have the work done I decided I wanted just the feathers tied with a leather strap and some beads. I looked up some color symbolism in Cherokee culture, chose the colors I wanted represented in the tattoo, then added turquoise because I love the color and it just seemed to fit with the design. My artist created a perfect conglomeration of my two tattoo ideas that sort of wraps around my right side.

I don't think of it only as a representation of my relationship with Bambi and my relationship with dad, though that is the general idea with the individual pieces-- except that the Cherokee tattoo is really about much more than just that.  Overall, I consider the whole piece to be a representation of my strength. It reminds me that I can overcome anything. It reminds me when I am weak-minded that I am a strong and adaptable creature.


My mother is on my left and my father is on my right. No matter what happens they will always be there for me and I will have constant mementos of them when I feel weak. The red flag of my past life is a palm across my ribcage that I touch now on days when I still feel as if my heart is breaking. 

A Little Later Than I Really Intended, Part I...

But I said I'd do it.  So here it is.

I got it done in 2010.  I thought about it for months before I got it done.  Which I highly recommend doing if you intend to have ink done.  It is not a decision to be entered into lightly.  It is PERMANENT and it HURTS.  Also, YOU WILL BLEED.  And not in a "oh, look at this little papercut on my pinkie" kind of way or a "I'm going to need stitches" kind of way.

It's exactly the kind of bleeding that makes sense in this situation, actually.  It's sort of an "hours of needles drilling into the layers of my flesh, but not actually piercing of cutting me" kind of bleeding.

Go figure.

Also, tattoos feel like exactly what you'd think they would feel like.  You know, if you sat and thought about it logically.  Which I only did after.

It kind of feels like someone is taking a vibrating needle and dragging it around on your bare skin.  Again, go figure.  Because that's pretty much exactly what it is.

And if you get color you get multiple needles.  It also feels like the artist is pressing harder.

There's also shading.  Imagine someone is scrubbing the same bit of your skin over and over again with a couple big needles.  Because that's pretty much what it feels like.

I'm not saying this to deter anyone from getting a tattoo.  I would never do that because I think they are beautiful.  But I also think they should be done for the right reasons.  And "I kinda like butterflies and swirly shit" is in no way, shape, or form a good reason to get a tramp stamp.

Unless you're over 40.  Then I figure you can pretty much do whatever you want.

In all reality, though, I am a firm believer in the symbolism of tattoos.  So here are both of mine.


Tattoo number one.



When I was in my early teens my mom told me elephants are good luck.  I locked that information away in my brain vault for a while and nearly forgot about it.  In 2008 (while I was living with Bambi) I was having trouble choosing a birthday present for her...  Until I saw a crystal figurine of an elephant.  It was perfect.  It even had a box with a shaped foam pillow.

When I gave it to her, she put the box on display in the dining room, but didn't take the elephant out of it.

During this time period I started having terrible stomach pains pretty much all the time.  I would wake up sick to my stomach every morning and I couldn't even think about food until mid-afternoon, so most days I wouldn't eat until after I got home from work.  My doctor had no idea what was wrong with me.  So she scheduled an ultrasound on my gut.

The ultrasound was first thing in the morning, which was terrible because my stomach was so sensitive that the slight pressure from the ultrasound was like someone grinding the end of a baseball bat into a bruise.  Bambi sat in the waiting room because the ultrasound room was small, but my mom came in.  I was lying on the table in my paper gown with my hands clasped protectively over my stomach when she reached into her purse and pulled out the box with the elephant in it.  Just in case we needed it.

After I moved out of my apartment we started collecting elephant paraphernalia.  Usually figurines and things.  But it became more than just luck.  It's more like a symbol for our bond now.  One that not even the worst relationship I could have ever imagined having could sever or damage.

When I started really thinking about getting a tattoo I pretty much automatically knew it was going to be an elephant.  I wanted it to be triumphant-looking with its trunk upraised.  Then I started thinking about what I wanted to incorporate because I initially assumed this would be my only tattoo as they aren't a great idea for opera singers to have.

I really like the idea of magical realism.  If you don't know what that is you're missing out on a very cool Latin American writing style and you should read some Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  I knew I wanted to add something magical in there, not only because of this but also because I am so lucky and blessed to have overcome a lot of my past.  I didn't want it to be purely magic or cartoon-ish, however.  Then I stumbled across an image someone had drawn of an elephant with some stars on it.  There were several things I didn't like about it, but overall I thought the image was perfect.  And my artist is a rock star, so she just changed it and made it exactly what I wanted.  She added a moon and made some of the stars be "white on black" instead of "black on white".

The last part is the music.  Obviously I had to get some music.  And since I'm a soprano I definitely wanted a treble clef.  I also knew for sure I wanted it to come out of the elephant's trunk like water, which she did perfectly as well.  The notes are the very beginning of an aria from the opera Madame Butterfly called Un bel di.  I performed it in 2009 very shortly after I started singing again and I still feel a pretty deep connection with it.  The aria is the lead female character saying that one day her husband will return to her, then explaining what she will do when he arrives.

When I got my tattoo done I was in a very hard place with Bambi.  I had been dating someone else.  I tried to date this particular man twice but, wonderful as he was to me, he just couldn't compare.  I found myself getting angry with him frequently over little things and when I thought about it, the only reason I could find that I was really upset with him was that he wasn't Bambi.  So that didn't last very long.

From a time long before I moved out of my apartment I would wish every day that the person I had fallen in love with in 2007 would come back, but he just kept slipping further and further away from me.  At the time it seemed fitting that the music on my tattoo would be a song saying "one day he will return to me".  Though it may seem as if I would by now wish I had chosen another song that had different meaning, that is never a choice I've regretted.

To a point, I still feel that way.  I will always love him.  I will always want him to be the person I fell in love with, the person who loved me with all of his heart.  But he will always choose alcohol (among other things, now, I'm sure) above me.  I really don't think he will never be the person I would need him to be in order to spend my life with him.  So maybe he will return to me in another life.