I got a secret tattoo during a near-life experience. It is a mustached skull and crossbones. I happened upon it, and much like my near-death tattoo, it is a permanent reminder of a moment I may be better off forgetting.
Live, Give
I once needed a liver. My name was never on any official organ transplant waitlist, but I spent years plead-praying for one the way non-spiritual desperate people do when their lives depend on something fully out of their hands. I wasn’t on any official waitlist because the liver was not meant for my body. It should have been surgically placed
Crash and Yearn
The summer after my eighteenth birthday, I stomped into a tattoo parlor on College Avenue, sat backwards hugging the back of a plastic-wrapped chair, and powered through my second tattoo. Despite the cliché and my best efforts, the tattoo is not an imprint of youthful invincibility, but my first admission of what little control I will ever have over my
Ink Sisters
My sister, Mary, and I got our first tattoos on our fifth sister trip. At the time, she was eleven years old and I was sixteen.