Tattoo by Keith at Modify Tattoo and Piercing
Becker MN, 2019
Having grown up in a conservative family, and now as an adult being active in my church (I currently serve on the deacon board), my tattoos started a lot of interesting conversations. There is a verse in the Bible, Leviticus 19:28, which is often translated into English as “Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the Lord.” Many (especially older) Christians believe that this is a clear indication that God is anti-tattoo. But a little linguistic digging reveals that the more correct translation would be something like “do not cut your bodies or put marks on yourself for the dead,” a direct reference to a pagan practice of the time that revolved around ancestor worship. In fact, there wasn’t even an English word for tattoo at the time of the earliest English Bible translations – that phrasing was added later.
Another verse, 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, says “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.” This verse has been used to argue against anything and everything – dancing, alcohol, sex, drugs, piercings, tattoos, gluttony – you name it. If you can do it to your body, this verse has been used to stigmatize it. One day I was on Pinterest and I came across an image of a woman with tattoos all over her body. The caption said, “My body is a temple, too. Mine just has stained glass windows.” That made me laugh, and at the same time resonated with me deeply!
I’m an historian. I LOVE old buildings. I wrote my graduate thesis on historic preservation. When traveling domestically, I seek out Carnegie Libraries. Internationally, I seek out cathedrals. I am enamored of the stories of the craftsmen who dedicated their lives to working on the various aspects of cathedrals, knowing the entire time that they would probably not live long enough to see the work finished. Most of the European cathedrals took hundreds of years to complete. There is something so powerful about dedicating your life to something bigger than yourself, knowing that you will probably not see the end, but that it will be worth it anyway.
The things that are worth it take time.
The things that really matter are bigger than me.
My body is a temple with stained glass windows.
I started searching for images of stained glass window tattoos. There are some really cool ones out there, but my favorite windows are the rose windows (the round stained glass windows above the front and sometimes rear entrances of a cathedral), and I wanted my tattoo to express the feeling of the process. I started searching for images of the windows themselves, and found some cool medieval-era architectural drawings. Thus I decided to go with a rose window that would be architectural plans on one end, fading into the finished shape, fading into the finished and colored shape.
I met with my artist, Keith, bringing him a bunch of images of rose windows and architectural drawings of them. He was enthusiastic about my idea, and I let him run with it. After all, he’s the artist, and he knows a lot more about what will work well in a tattoo. He did the section that looks like plans in a scratchy style, grey like pencil marks. The outline is a crisp black, and the finished side has white ink in the negative to make the colored sections pop. We used my favorite colors: teal blues, greens, and purples. The center piece I had him color with yellow ink.
This was my most painful and time-consuming tattoo. It took three hours, and some of the curves and larger colored-in sections were painful. I had it done less than three weeks ago. It needs a little color touchup. I think the transition from outline to colored in is too much of an abrupt line, so I will have him add some more color to fade in more. But it’s currently in the healing phase, so I need to let it heal before I go back for more.
In the short time I have had this tattoo, many people have asked me if it’s not finished yet. This makes my husband laugh every time, because he told me that people would think it was unfinished. But I don’t mind, because it gives me the chance to tell people about the why behind this tattoo.
