As a kid, I used to admire the tattoos of the adults around me. The flowers on that woman’s arm, a skull on some guy’s shoulder blade, books and constellations, friendship promises and memoriams. I can’t wait to cover myself in art, I would think. How cool would that be? To have a story cemented into your skin forever.
This past September, I finally turned 18, and my mom kindly allowed me to get a tattoo. Honestly, there was no question what I wanted to get. I’ve drawn the doodle for years: on school papers, henna with friends, and it even sits in my phone case on a shred of paper. A simple crescent moon, two lines, and six dots. That’s all.
This world sucks. I mean, c’mon: war, poverty, betrayal, and all the heartbreaking things that leave you disheveled and hopeless. It’s a stressful place to inhabit, but with all of the endless bad I could dwell on, I can also list an endless amount of good. Tear-jerking conversations with friends about childhood, laughs that make your abs hurt, hugs, and feeding a lonely duck at a pond. At the top of my list of hope lies love.
I may not be rich, the future stresses the heck out of me, people are needlessly cruel to others, and the planet isn’t doing amazing, but above all of the things I don’t own or can’t change is my love. It’s free, it’s mine, and it’s an endless stream. I get to choose where it goes—how much of a bucket I should fill. I love to love; to let those around me know what they are to me in the sappiest of manners.
More so, my tattoo represents my hope. A hope that my love lives on in any form possible. Through old vinyls that have been passed down the family line, old Polaroids of birthdays and friends found in an attic box, lessons and earnest advice I’d offered, and maybe, hopefully, through stupid, idiotic, small anything’s that bring forth a memory of me and my wildest adventures.
I often look to the moon and feel this hope of mine. The moon has always been a thing I’ve adored. It’s witnessed the greatest triumphs and travesties of humanity, but it still remains way up there, just observing. I hope that, in a way, I’m eternal like that. In the past with lessons yet to be learned, in the present with friends and materialistic possessions, and in the future with endless possibilities; the unknown after a dot, dot, dot.
Maybe one day, long after I’ve come and gone, some teenage girl will find some scrappy green flannel that is far too big for her. A $5.99 purchase that becomes her prized possession. She spills food on it, rips it a bit, and puts it away until fall leaves float down again. Even if it’s in such a simple way, if my love is felt and becomes revived, life will always have been worth the earth-shattering trivialities.
