Tattoos Are Virtuous

Kristina Tabor Saccone on memory and body art.

Today we share some late-summer reflections on tattoos as souvenirs and body art — a practice that, as author

Kristina Tabor Saccone

notes, has unexpectedly become a political act. (Kristina, by the way, is also a fiction writer, and you can keep up to date with her work here.) Enjoy!

— Santiago Ramos, executive editor

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With my eight tattoos, a common question — from friends and strangers — is: “Why did you get that?” I end up in conversation with people who wax dreamily about how they’ve always wanted to get inked but haven’t. “It doesn’t feel right,” is the general sentiment, driven perhaps by preemptive social criticism. This soft self-censure has hardened in recent months as the administration deported migrants with prominent tattoos. A Palestinian friend, casually discussing potential ink, recently said to me, “Getting a tattoo these days is practically a ticket to arrest.” I think about this often, even as I write this, while the poppies on my outstretched forearm move in concert with my typing hands. The three flowers and two buds symbolize remembrance and remind me of those I’ve loved and lost: my mother, my grandparents, a best friend. As prominently as their red blooms on my exposed skin, I say tattoos are virtuous.

I didn’t always think this way. Like many of us, my parents trained me well in their morals and self-righteousness. My mother reserved a special tone whenever she mentioned “pierced and tattooed” people, her response a reflection of a common taboo among the Boomers: tattoos signaled a lower class, a lesser being, or a vice. Instead I found other ways to rebel in my youth without crossing that line of inking my skin. I dabbled in other vices: cigarettes, rowdy rock shows, alcohol. I’m not sure it’s fair to say that my mother approved of any of these things, but she tolerated them in a way that tattooing would have crossed a line.

These fears are not without precedent. Tattoos, over time, have suffered from a reputation of vice rather than virtue. Looking at ancient history, in Greco-Roman culture, tattoos were a disgrace, seen as something reserved as a mark for the enslaved. More recently, tattoos have represented subversion, the punk scene and dismissiveness of conventionality.

I fast forward to age 30, when my grandmother’s death left something of a hole in my sense of meaning. She was my mother’s mother, the matriarch of our family, the one who made a home in Harrow, England, with the tallest of trees in the backyard. Summers growing up, I remember lying there on short-cut grass, watching the clouds float adjacent to the oak’s arms. The tree was a mainstay, seemingly invulnerable, and a symbol of my family line.

I decided to get it tattooed on my back. This would be the first time I’d cross the line that my mother set so many years previous. But it was an act that seemed virtuous: a memorial to my grandparents, now both gone, and to our family’s legacy. It didn’t matter how good or right this tattoo felt to me. My mother cried upon first seeing it, not tears of sentiment but instead shocked that I dropped so much ink into my clean, white skin.

They say that once you get inked, you’re addicted. I agree with the concept that one tattoo begets more tattoos, but not because it’s an addiction. The more I’ve inked my skin, the clearer it is virtuous and good. This was obvious with my second tattoo. Also in my thirties, after trying to get pregnant, for thirteen weeks I thought I was having a baby. Then, I learned the pregnancy wasn’t viable. The baby I envisioned, one that didn’t exist yet except in my mind, wouldn’t be a part of our lives; this is the grief of miscarriage. I commissioned a print artist I loved for a memorial design. The picture depicts a moon with a bird’s silhouette flying out from the crescent. The moon, a symbol of motherhood, and the bird, a symbol of my lost child.

It’s easy to call something virtuous when it’s meaningful. These initial tattoos warranted a permanent place on my body because of the memories and experiences that they represented. I admit that, at the time, I also hoped that my disapproving family might make an exception for a thoughtful graphic dedicated to a mutual love or loss. All the while, though, I was telling my life story through pictures on my body.

My third tattoo came from a deep desire for place, a story that’s forever rooted in my being. After fifteen years living in Colorado, I’d moved back east to be near my mother and, I hoped, to benefit from built-in childcare for my then three-year-old. DC wasn’t all I imagined, though, when my mother fell ill with dementia, and I became her caregiver. These early years back in DC were hard. Romantically, I missed the ubiquitous mountain vistas, craving Colorado like a lover. Visiting Denver on a work trip one week, I walked into a tattoo studio on a snowy night and asked for a single line silhouette of the mountains that I so desired.

When I speak of my tattoos being virtuous, up until this point, I think “virtue” means – using Plato-speak – a wise solution to memorializing love lost. What they weren’t: particularly courageous. My first three tattoos were easily hidden by clothing. I could choose to show them – or not. And if someone asked me why I got them, I had a tidy story ready about memorials and grief and love – all things that are easily translatable as good to the average person.

It’s my subsequent tattoos that further define ink’s virtuosity. They not only tell a story but also show the courage of displaying it to the world. Except in the depths of winter, these pictures are ones that anyone can see. They are subjected to both unsolicited questions as well as compliments from strangers.

TSA agents, without a doubt, are among the most likely to laud my ink. This started with my first sleeve, which I got in a post-pandemic belated celebration of my 40th birthday. Coming back from Las Vegas, wrapped in saniderm, I got an enthusiastic “New ink? Love it” from the agent. The Lady Gaga-inspired anime character on my right arm doesn’t make a lot of sense to people. It doesn’t easily memorialize anything, or really look like Lady Gaga, when it comes down to it. But it permanently represents a moment in time, when I both wisely and courageously decided to literally wear my virtue on my sleeve.

That was the first of four, large pieces of art on my body, none of them easily hidden or explained away. These are my courageous tattoos: The Mad Tea Party from Alice in Wonderland wraps my left arm. The March Hare holds a teacup while the Dormouse nods off in the teapot, nestled in large, red roses. Alice sips her tea at the front of the scene, and it’s all a literary symbol of the world’s chaos. On my right thigh, a heron in black and grey linework, which I got in my home state of Maryland. On my left thigh, a 1920’s inspired portrait encircled with more roses, a tattoo that’s also from Las Vegas and by the masterful artist and Ink Master Joey Hamilton.

I wear these proudly and virtuously, despite the current threats of authoritarianism that, in part, present as a backlash against tattoos. And, I hope my son, nieces, nephews, and others will see them, that coming generations will kill the bias against well inked bodies. But will I get more tattoos anytime soon? I think I’ll wait until I’m ready to turn another page on my story – or until courage strikes me strongly enough to etch something further into my skin.

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