Two hours of torture and all I got was...wait, a GORGEOUS tattoo...

I know, I know, I took some time off. And yes, I know, you cried yourself to sleep every night because of it. I understand. There you were on Sunday night, patiently waiting for the end of your week-long wait for the newest installment of this very blog. And much to your disappointment, it never came. I apologize. Somehow, we will manage to get through this. Together.

I took some time off. After ending up in the hospital the other week, I needed time to get my life (and my intestines) back on track. Catching up on work and life took a lot out of me, but I’m back and ready to give all three of you blog readers what you have waited so long for! In easing back into the swing of things, I decided to take the time to continue my series on tattoos and talk you through tattoo number two. Hope you’re ready because the roundabout express is here!

If you’re a teenager and you want to scare the shit out of your mom, you can do a lot of fun things (get creative with it), but one surefire way to elicit panic is to call your mom and tell her you’re getting a $300 back tattoo. 60% of the time it works every time!

I say this, of course, having experienced it first hand. I was 19 at the time and was visiting home during the summer between my freshman and sophomore year at Boston University. As I talk about in my last tattoo post, I knew that I had become EXPONENTIALLY cooler for having a tattoo, and I had begun to wonder whether or not the addition of a second tattoo would increase that cool factor by an even higher exponential curve. OH THE POSSIBILITIES!

Not really, the reality is, I had been bitten by the bug that so many had said would bite after my first tattoo. I wanted more. To be honest, I really just think that once you get your first tattoo, you realize there is actually nothing to it at all. All those myths and stereotypes in your head about the types of people who have tattoos and what their lives must be like (I imagined lots of biker bars and leather jackets) just sort of fades away, You walk into the tattoo parlor one day and walk back out the exact same person, just with a permanent mark on your body and a sizeable dent in your wallet.

It had been about a year since my first tattoo and I was coming back home after a full year of college in the big city. I was 19, fully self-actualized, refined by my life in the city, etc. JUST KIDDING. I was still (and continue to still be) a dumb kid, but I had been planning my next tattoo for several months and knew that the trip home was the time to make it happen.

The tattoo is on my left shoulder and reads: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” CAUTION NUDEY-ISH PIC BELOW!

Now, for a little backstory. My senior year of high school, I had the great fortune of having English with my all-time favorite teacher, Mrs. Chickey. She had been my English teacher during my freshman year and had recently moved to senior English, giving me a double dose of the best that Liberty High School had to offer.

Now, understand, this is the teacher that made me want to be a teacher. This is that person in high school who, perhaps unknowingly, shapes the direction of your life. While my friends discovered their passions for science and engineering and architecture, Mrs. Chickey helped me discover my passion for literature and the way it helps build connections between people from all walks of life.

At this point I can’t remember all the details surrounding our foray into the world of T.S. Eliot, but it started with “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock”. As a closeted gay boy with A LOT of internalized emotion, I was always a fan of writing poetry. I had several journals and binders filled up with lines that in my adult life make me cringe and wonder how I convinced LITERALLY ANYONE that I was straight. It was all the kinds of things you would imagine a kid with bangs that swooped over his one eye might write.

I liked expressing myself through poetry, but always found it difficult to read. Despite enjoying literature, I really wasn’t all that strong of a student in English classes. I excelled in group discussion, but when it came to literary devices and analysis, I was lacking. So poetry always made me a little uncomfortable. Analysis of novels and short stories was something I could fumble through, but analyzing poetry? Ugh. But then, Mrs. Chickey introduced me to T.S. Eliot, and it all just seemed to click:

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Now there was something I could relate to. Preparing a face for the people I meet? Anxiously obsessing over time? Being trapped in a string of indecision and failed visions and revisions? Ok, I see you, T.S. Eliot with your themes transcending time and applying to the modern day.

So it started with Prufrock and I thought it couldn’t get any better, that is until Four Quartets came across my desk. A collection of four poems published over the course of six years, Four Quartets is considered by many to be one of Eliot’s last great works. There are a number of themes carried through the poems, but it all boils down to the very existential relationship between man and time. Tre relatable, once again, for a closeted kid with an anxiety disorder who started contemplating the inevitability and irreversibility of death at age 4.

I won’t go into all that much detail on the poem and its themes, you should read it for yourself and experience the magic. But what it really boils down to is this. For me, life is exploration. Whether you travel the world or never leave your hometown, every day and every experience is an exploration of life, its challenges, its joys, and its complexity. Exploration, in this sense, needn’t be limited to a word that describes people who are flying around the globe and turning over every leaf and exploring every part of every place they go. It simply means coming to understand the life you are living.

So, every day is a new day of exploration, and at the end of it all, we “arrive where we started and know the place for the first time” not physically, persay, but rather we arrive back at ourselves. Right? That makes sense, doesn’t it? At the end of our days, all we really have is ourselves. Our lives started with our consciousness and our understanding of the experiences we have had, and ultimately, that’s how it will end. So for me, this tattoo is a reminder that each day is an opportunity to grow and explore and come to understand myself and this world a little bit better. As I’ve gotten older and my anxiety has progressed, I have found myself, more often than not, overwhelmed by the idea that life might end before I completely and fully understand everything about it (hilarious, right?), but I’m working on it.

At the end of my life, what I really want is to arrive back at myself and feel settled in my understanding of who I am and the life I’ve lived. I don’t need to understand everything in the sense of reasons why and how and all that, but rather I want to have put built up enough of a lens of perspective to where I can accept everything that has happened as a part of my story.

I was just a year out of high school and was starting my journey in college in Boston, the city and the time wherein I felt like I was really “finding myself”. I was living what was to be the best and most formative years of my life, and so I wanted a reminder to take these experiences in stride and view them all as a map to ultimately understand myself a little better.

So, I paid $300 to sit backwards in a folding chair for two and half hours while a stranger carved out all 38 words of the quote into my back in a very elaborate medieval style script. I wasn’t aware, prior to this experience, that I could hold my breath for two and a half hours, but I am almost positive that I did. I sat hunched and clenched while I watched the shop owner’s pit bulls play behind a baby gate in the room next two us (questionable health rating-wise, I know) until finally, after two and half hours of torture, he announced, “Alright, I’m all done with the outline, how do you want it filled in?” I laughed and told him to never touch me again. He slapped a giant piece of saran wrap on my back with some masking tape (again, questionable healthcare tactic) and the rest, is history. Fun fact, in order to quell my mother’s worry over the tattoo, I asked her to design the first letter in the style of the old fairytale books where the first letter of a sentence is an ornate drawing (see below). Extra fun fact, I was so tense for so long during this tattooing process that I LITERALLY pulled a muscle.

Until next time, y’all.

Peace and love.

Adam