I love tattoos.  Bad colours usually, bad

designs nearly always but with that mark

the person becomes slightly different from

those without.  Someting sinister in the willinginess to score the flesh in the name of love or art.  But mainly I am touched by the innocence, the childlike faith in a tomorrow etched into an arm or thigh or buttock or breast.  They think tomorrow will come and they will be there - the word is cut not into granite but into flesh and the word becomes flesh.

 

My favourites are names with religious symbols a close second.  Hank or Rocky or Caroline loved as long as the flesh endures and when I see a couple on the sreet one

with a name etched I want to run to ask if

the person with them is still Hank or Rocky

or Caroline has your daring painful love endured or you there with shining cross

do you still love your Jesus as much as you

did that day.  Probably hung over or working on one and guiltily claimed one man, one name as the one thing that will save you? 

But what of Isis, the great Pan?  Now, on

your way to Black Mass do you roll down your sleeves?  Has Rocky become Ernie? 

Has Betty replaced Caroline?

 

I love tattoos... and I would love to have

one that all could see get my buttock or breast

inscribed with my message to the world but

I have none of that innocent faith.  I know nothing of tomorrow and my verities are all too prosaic none having the cryptic strength of a cross or a lover's name.

 

My faith such as it is is a nameless and

faceless love, painful, violent, full of

wonder for what might be but has never

been.  It is beyond description and can be embodied only by implication, the gesture being more symbolic than the word. 

Although somewhere in me or on me

and everywhere that I am I too am etched

with the unseen mark of my love,

the hidden tattoo of my pain.