When I lifted my sweater at the restaurant to show my mother the tattoo to the right of my spine, she didn’t respond. I’d prefaced the show-and-tell by assuring her that this was a one-time thing, that I would never get another one, and that I hoped she’d understand why I did it. 

“Mom, this isn’t just a tattoo. You know that. It’s a commemoration. Dad would have liked it, I think,” I explained, pointing to the slanted letters that spelled RUN LIKE THE WIND.

Her parents had raised her Roman-Catholic, and she’d been the oldest of six siblings. In photographs, my mother’s church dresses are pressed and her saddle shoes are paired with ivory-lace socks that flare at her ankles like blooming petals.

Her mother had discouraged her from sitting when she wore her Sunday best until it was absolutely necessary, warning against what she’d called “sit wrinkles”—something I too had been trained to avoid at a young age. My mother’s upbringing, combined with decades of more church going and her innate affection for following the rules, made her as opposed to permanent ink as she was to premarital sex.

  The tattoo was done in my father’s handwriting that I’d found on cassette tapes in an old shoebox. He’d recorded albums on them from the radio and his record player, of what he called “the classics”: Jefferson Airplane, Moody Blues, The Beach Boys, Bob Seger. When I left for college, eight years after his death, I took his copy of Simon and Garfunkel’s Concert at Central Park with a fledgling idea to get a tattoo with his slanted, all-capital script.

 RUN LIKE THE WIND was a nod to his embarrassing presence at my Saturday track meets when I was in the third and fourth grades. He’d sit on the topmost bleacher and, when I rounded the part of the track nearest him, he would bellow the phrase through his meaty hands. 

I got the tattoo a month before I showed it to my mother—on the ninth anniversary of September 11th, the day my father went to work in one of the Twin Towers and never came out. I imagined my mother’s reaction to my “desecration of my temple to God,” one of the Bible verses she had on speed dial. The date fell on a Saturday, when most of the girls from my house had traveled off-campus to someone’s family home for a barbeque, so I walked into Northampton alone with the cassette tape in my purse. Before leaving, I swallowed a couple Hydrocodone from my stash of pills intended for my back pain to combat the worst of the discomfort I was anticipating.

I’d picked the spine for the phrase’s location, mostly because it was easily concealable. A couple years later, I realized that, by coincidence, the sentence spanned the same vertebrae that had been deemed degenerative by three different specialists when I was fifteen. The diagnosis and the end of my thirteen-year dancing career that came along with it had been the most devastating loss since my father’s death. The idea that both sources of grief could be captured in four words felt like fate. But when I looked in the mirror and saw the script as if my father had written it directly on me in Sharpie, I wished that I had picked somewhere else to put it, somewhere I could see it.

“Thanks for telling me,” my mother said at the restaurant, looking back down at the check. “You can put your shirt down now. We’re not the only ones here, you know.” 

I waited for her to say something else, a reaction of any kind or even a diatribe against my decision, but instead she felt around in her bag for her keys and pushed her chair back, not waiting for me on the walk to the car. Neither of us mentioned the tattoo again.

• 
  

The pain of the tattoo was impossible to rank in relation to a back spasm or a gnarly gash because it lived in its own category. It was more of a vibrating burning than white-knuckling pain—more like scratching than stabbing. I was mesmerized by it, and disappointed when it was over. 

But there was no way to gauge what it would have felt like without the veneer of numbness from the medication. I made a promise to myself that the next time, even though I promised my mother there wouldn’t be another one, I would go in without training wheels. I wanted to reside in the pain past my threshold. 

After RUN LIKE THE WIND, I began accumulating both tattoos and piercings, steadily at first and then in manic droves, always with pill bottles and spliffs and flasks to accompany me. The piercings had begun before the ink had, though I didn’t get my earlobes pierced until I was fourteen. Up until then, I’d had a distaste for jewelry, convinced that all kinds of earrings would look unbecoming on me. I wasn't aware that I was covering up a deeper fear that I wouldn't be able to withstand the pain, that I wouldn't be able to look the way I thought I would with piercings—beautiful. But four years after the first pair, I was on my knees pleading with my mother to let me get my belly button pierced. 

It was the summer after I’d graduated high school and was living at home, working at a deli chain and spending my free time entangled with my boyfriend that I’d have to leave at the end of August.

“You are going down the wrong road, Elise. This is just the start, believe me,” my mother warned, employing her tone she reserved for the most serious of conversations. We were in the den, she on the couch and me supplicating on the ground in front of her with my hands on her knees.

“But it’s not like anyone will know. The only people who will see will be the ones on the beach next month,” I whined.

“Right, and who will be on the beach with you? How do you think that reflects on me?” My mother wrapped her cardigan around her body and crossed her arms with force. I could tell I wasn’t going to win.

By then, I was blubbering. In that moment, I’d never wanted anything more. I thought a pierced navel would make me into the adult I’d been itching to become—unique, independent, even attractive.

“You need to be more concerned with how you look to others and what they think when they see you, what it says about your character,” she said emphatically.

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to care what people thought,” I challenged her.

“Well…” my mother paused. “This is an exception.”

To her, the matter was settled, but my friend Sarah picked me up later that night and drove us to a late-night piercing shop with barred windows in a grimy part of Memphis where we picked out matching turquoise belly button barbells. We held hands while each of us had it done. The sense of empowerment from our act of self-governance was intoxicating. I didn’t need to worry about my mother finding out until she and I got to the beach. There were always one-piece bathing suits.

Sarah and I were both familiar with pain, and we probably handled the discomfort better than most. We’d danced and performed together at the same ballet school since we were nine, and hours of rehearsing in pointe shoes came with blisters, bruising, and ingrown toenails. Once injuries prevented me from dancing anymore, it felt like I’d lost that world she and I had shared, the world she was still a part of. Our matching piercings were metal links that reconnected us, even though they didn’t have the strength to replace the one that had been broken.

The pain from the needle threading in and out of the flesh above my navel made my eyes water and my nose flood with snot. By the time the throbbing passed, I was already replaying the nerve-wracking seconds between the piercer’s “Are you ready?” and the surprise of the needle. I wanted to feel it again.

I never asked my mother’s permission as far as piercings were concerned after that, knowing it would only lead to acrimonious disagreements. When I called her from college to tell her that I’d gotten my nose pierced, she hung up and didn’t answer my calls for several days, though she seemed relieved the next time she saw me. I figured she’d imagined the bull-ring-style septum piercing, which I would also get later on, instead of the tasteful stud that was nestled in the crease of my nose. 

When she visited me in Nashville after I’d graduated college and was working at a dysfunctional local magazine, I had recently added an oversized hoop around my lower lip that clanked against my teeth when I talked.

“How could you do that to your face?” my mother demanded to know. “You have a pretty face. Why ruin it?” She looked at me with her head tilted to one side, her indication of ultimate disappointment.

“I like my piercings. They set me apart.” I felt childish defending myself.

“If you’re going for the tough act, you have it down. Not sure how many men will be attracted to that,” she said, shaking her head. “I wish you’d at least take that out while I’m here.”

To say that I got piercings in defiance of my mother’s protest is an exaggeration. Her disapproval was a byproduct. Like the one-of-a-kind feeling from that first tattoo, the endorphin explosion from the piercing needle was unlike any other rush I’d experienced. I quickly came to seek the head and body highs from the pain that I not only willed but purposefully sought out. But the pain was just a part of it. I was drawn to the mystique of the physical, visual beauty that also emerged from it. I was doing it—and I would continue to do it—for the release, the warmth that spread in my body like ink dispersing in water, rushing and expanding and mushrooming to fill every space inside me.

• 
  

I justified my trips to piercing shops as socially acceptable inflictions of pain, though my mother believed otherwise. The process was professional, controlled, and constructive. 

Something beautiful came from it—the jewelry dotted my otherwise blank body, except for my tattoo, which set me apart from almost everyone I knew then. Each time I went, I felt changed. I was reinventing how I saw myself. The piercings showed off my tolerance for pain, and suggested that I enjoyed it. By letting everyone else see that I was strong, I started to believe it too.

I’d never been a cutter, though I’m surprised now that my attraction to momentary blips of pain hadn’t led me to it. I’d only known two girls my age who’d self-inflicted—one of them had been in my class in high school. After her lawyer parents discovered the slender rows on the insides of their daughter’s forearms that she usually kept covered by Hot Topic arm bands, they put her in outpatient therapy and had the scars removed by lasers. After treatment, she got a rainbow-striped heart tattooed on the top of her foot that she’d somehow been able to convince her parents on a continual basis was a sticker.

When I moved back to Memphis, I found a piercing and tattoo shop near my apartment called Underground Art that sat on crumbling sidewalk and next to a rank-smelling vegan restaurant. As with all professional shops, they had a “no drunks” policy, but they never said anything to me. They never hinted at my liquor perfume that would have been partially masked by cigarettes I’d chain smoke on the way over, or that I was sloppy in my speech. At the time, I doubted they could pick up on it, but with the clarity of sobriety now, there’s no way they didn’t. 

I’d make a dent in a pint of Jim Beam from the fleet of plastic bottles I stored in my glove compartment during the car ride over. Once I got into cocaine, I would do a couple key bumps on the way to up the ante on my sociability. Piercings were intimate, a relative stranger manipulating and altering my body, and the coke helped me feel more self-assured and sociable. I perceived my conversational charm as proof of my power and self-confidence.

When I could get my hands on more than just my prescribed stash of Hydrocodone and Tramadol, like Xanax or Valium, I went for the more painful sites after taking one or two of each. In the ear, that meant spots like the conch, industrial, snug, and anti-tragus—all areas of thick tissue to puncture. Elsewhere, that meant the tongue, nipples, clitoris hood, and dermals, single-point piercings that sat on the surface of the skin with anchors inserted beneath.

After the piercer marked the spot with a toothpick that she dipped in ink and handed me the mirror to approve the placement, I followed her instructions until she didn’t have to say them anymore. She waited for my deep inhale and then inserted the needle on my exhale. I loved the sound of cartilage crunching when it surrendered to the needle. I loved the pulsing pause while the piercer reached for the jewelry and the quieter pain of the hoop, barbell, or stud going through the new wound. 

What took me years to realize was that these expressions of individuality requiring suffering as a rite of passage granted me control of my body, fully inhabiting it. Since the end of my ballet career, I’d lost touch with it—the way it could move and how far I could push it. Since then, I hadn’t found another way to reconnect with my body. I was only aware of its limitations. 

The physical shock of piercings was the closest I could find to the familiar agony of dancing on pointe and my old knee, Achilles, and back injuries. I couldn’t move my body for the sake of art anymore, but I could decorate it for the same purpose. There was a surrender to the piercer and her performance that determined what I would look like. She was making me beautiful by doing something I was incapable of achieving on my own.

I considered it an aesthetic form of torture—the kind that was never inherently harmful and that transformed skin into something unnatural, but artful. I was a walking testimony of Sylvia Plath’s quote, “Wear your heart on your skin in this life.” The compulsion to populate my constellation of titanium, jewels, and stones pointed toward an addiction, but I didn’t see it at the time. Neither did I see my drinking and using that way. They were just things I enjoyed doing. 

But in both realms—piercings and substances—I was avoiding pain, even though I was flinging myself toward it. I was signing myself up to be on the frontline. Meanwhile, I was softening the blow of suffering, of self-destruction. I was confining myself to a backwards box of survival that created pain while attempting to mask it at the same time. I was stunting the suffering I was purposefully chasing, which kept me coming back. 

Sometimes a drive through the neighborhood adjacent to Underground Art was enough to warrant a stop for a new hoop or stud. When I hadn’t thought about what I wanted, I relied on someone at the shop to suggest something. The times I did little preparation, I took pain medication that had permanent residence in my purse and drank from my glove compartment’s supply of whiskey.

But when I planned ahead, I’d start with beer or a couple glasses of wine and follow with part of a spliff and a couple pills for good measure. Half of getting something pierced was the pre-game that I’d whittled down to a science, one that both numbed the register of the needle while also leaving me coherent enough to not be suspiciously impaired, or so I assumed. 

The celebration of my bejeweled victories afterwards mostly involved alcohol and weed. I’d either stop at a bar afterwards for whiskey sodas or pick up room-temperature chardonnay from the gas station on the corner of my street. There wasn’t as much of a need for pills because the worst was over, and living with the dull humming at the site of the new jewelry was what I enjoyed most. It was constant but manageable. At that point, it seemed like I could control everything I felt.

• 
  

The preparation for tattoos varied because the pain was sustained, though duller for the most part than the jaw-clenching shock of a piercing needle. I’d still smoke weed and drink and use cocaine, probably twice as much, taking care to use mouthwash and perfume afterwards, and I’d save the pills for the moment I arrived at the shop so that they would kick in just as the session started. 

I always went alone, thinking that bringing someone would distract me from the experience. When the tattooer took breaks, I’d tell her I needed a smoke and would hide by the dumpster behind the vegan restaurant and smoke the rest of the spliff I’d brought. 

The pills provided the soft warmth that hummed at a slower frequency than the tattoo gun. They constructed a thin screen between my sensory receptors and the outside world, so that everything felt manageable. The result was a slow fuzz that transformed my default state of unease into dazed contentment. The marijuana slowed things down even more, while the alcohol blanketed the mixture like a sealant. And when I got the combination exactly right, I was invincible to social anxiety, to any possible regrets. I don’t remember the drugs ever wearing off too early.

When I was conceptualizing a new piece, I’d draw an outline of my body, sketching the ink I already had, and identify possible areas for additions. I usually leaned toward asymmetry. Aside from their permanence, tattoos came with stories that piercings didn’t. 

The antlers above my right breast referenced the summer I was an apprentice poetry teacher for a small Vermont boarding school. While making one of my usual middle-of-the-night trips to smoke weed with the music instructor who was on the other side of the school-farm’s property, my flashlight flickered and died. 

I was in the thick of the woods and ahead of me about twenty yards was an antlered buck, frozen and staring me down. While the rest of the story might suggest that I was tripping on acid or at the very least extremely high, I was sober when the deer nodded its head, turned its body to face the direction I’d been walking in, and looked behind at me, as if he were waiting for me to join him. 

I inched my way toward him, aware of his ability to charge me, and walked slowly beside him for what felt like close to half a mile in silence, until I saw the porch light from my friend’s cabin in a clearing. 

I also enjoy telling people that I met James Duval, an actor in my longtime favorite film, Donnie Darko, at a comic book convention, where he was promoting his own project. He’d played Frank in the movie, the human-sized rabbit and partial hallucinatory character in Donnie’s world, and after asking what I hoped were unique, niche questions about the film, James told me that he’d done all the on-screen handwriting. 

He took a Sharpie he was using for autographs and penned CELLAR DOOR, which Drew Barrymore’s character explains is the most beautiful phrase in the English language, on the back of my neck. As fate would have it, there was a tattoo convention down the hall. I wandered down the rows of booths before finding an open tattooer and had the actor’s letters traced in ink. 

• 
  

By twenty-four, I had sixteen tattoos: a half-sleeve of bare trees on my right forearm, a quill on my left with the hope that it would remind me to write more often, PEACE in psychedelic letters under my left breast, and the state of Tennessee filled in with the state bird’s feathers. I’d even gotten zinc zirconium dermals that looked like push pins on a map to mark Memphis and Nashville as the two cities in the state where I’d lived. 

I had a pair of cracked, fuchsia lips below my right hip bone to symbolize my bisexuality, getting the idea from a male model in a fashion magazine who sported one, and CELLAR DOOR below the mole on the back of my neck. I had the second part of my favorite quote from the film, Magnolia, “WE MAY BE THROUGH WITH THE PAST, BUT THE PAST AIN’T THROUGH WITH US,” creeping up into my right armpit, an abstract birds-on-telephone-wire illustration on my left thigh, and a vine giving way to a wilted leaf on the other side of RUN LIKE THE WIND. 

A dancer lived on the back of my right leg, the side of my torn Achilles tendon. Reimagining the seamed ballet tights that I’d been required to wear, I had a single line running the length of my leg with a woman in a maroon, flared dress suspended from it. A semi-colon was tucked behind my right ear in recognition of mental illness, since I'd been diagnosed bipolar a few years earlier. The punctuation was also a symbol for overcoming addiction—a disease I didn't think I had, or didn't want to think I had.

I had a set of five tally marks on the top of my left wrist to honor my favorite number and remember my difficulty with counting when I was young. The antlers of the buck were arranged at an angle on my right pec, and a compass was affixed to my right foot. Finally, a Ralph Steadman sketch was stamped on my right shoulder of a cartoon couple embracing, the man’s head splattered with blood from an evil Cupid’s arrow.

I was the orchestrator of my own body in the sense that I could control what was being added to it that wasn’t already there. I wasn’t changing or hiding behind the ink. I was announcing my identity. I was making myself a walking, breathing exhibit. 

I was in it to become beautiful, to become a decorated, more interesting version of myself. And so long as I could withstand the pain, I welcomed it as the price of my transformation. I bathed in the pride that came from overcoming the suffering. It didn't wear off like the drugs inevitably did. It was as permanent as the ink, and as tangible as the jewelry. I had indisputable proof that I was strong—something I couldn't, or didn't know how, to convey with my invisible, internal struggles. Each addition to my body was evidence to everyone else that I'd tested my own limitations, and evidence to me that I had entered a deeper level of understanding of what I'd been through. I commemorated those events—my father's baffling death, the painful end to my years of dancing, my struggle with mental illness—that, before the ink and metal, I didn't have a way to convey. Now, I could point to each one and say, "This is what I survived."