On Sparrows and Slaves

So I have finally scheduled a session to get a new tattoo. In mid-November, I will spend approximately 2.5 hours fulfilling the decade-old desire to get a second tattoo, having gotten my first one about fifteen years ago, on my back. Where I can't effing see it. I sometimes forget it's there, which is crazy since it's about twelve inches wide and five inches tall.

The reason I took so long to get another tat? Indecision. Wanting to select something meaningful and durable, but also beautiful. Wanting to have an image that could tell me something about where I was in my life when I got it, like a message in a bottle. But also wanting something timeless enough that I would still enjoy it in twenty years.

For quite a while, I thought about getting a single sparrow inked on my forearm. You know the archetype: they usually come in pairs, associated with classic sailor tattoo imagery, and symbolize homecoming. I felt that I had not completed my personal journey, so one sparrow would make more symbolic sense for me. And then I entered graduate school and learned the main purpose of all those ships in the 18th and 19th centuries.

I learned that the beautiful ships with the tall masts and multiple sails, the swelling hulls and cannons, were carrying captive African men, women, and children to the white people who would enslave them. When they weren't carrying stolen people, they were transporting the raw materials or finished goods that these stolen people were forced to produce. Slavery was not just a small, negligible part of the maritime industry. It made the maritime industry.

Learning this history made it difficult to romanticize the lovely imagery of classic tattooing, much of which emerges from maritime culture during the era of slavery. I see the ships and I think of how the roses might symbolize the dead whose bodies were tossed overboard, or those who drowned. But I don't think that's what 99% of white Americans see when they see ship tattoos. Perhaps the romance of the sea? The challenge of raw sailor life? It's a visual culture that has become completely divorced from its origins. Fascinating, really.

'Tulips and Tulipomania'
Morocco leather
Bound by Jean Gunner, 1982 (USA)

So I've decided to get something beautiful, so beautiful that it will endure regardless of my future political, social, and cultural interests. It won't be a bouquet like the image above, but the flowers will be similar. Two or three of them, cascading down my forearm, interlaced with greenery. Should be lovely. Though, they are tulips, which Michael Pollan tells me are responsible for much theft and mania in Holland hundreds of years ago. This, at least, I can blissfully ignore.