It was a scorching summer day when my husband and I got a letter advertising the grand opening of a new tattoo shop downtown. To celebrate, they would spend the day inking people for free. Of course reasonable restrictions applied. Those about to be tattooed had to be of age and the tattoo of their choice had to be small, about an inch and a half in diameter or less, and only one color.

If I were to ever get a tattoo, it would have fit that description. I’d considered getting inked for years but never got around to it due to needing the money for other things like bills, groceries, et cetera. Here was my chance. I’d finally get that little blue St. Ambrose cross I wanted in the middle of my back, just below my waist.

I should not have been too surprised by the turnout, given increased acceptability and even popularity of tattoos across a much broader social spectrum. Still, it looked like the whole town showed up to get inked, and I became one of the many turned away.

It’s just as well.

When I was a senior in high school, I entered a monologue in the district high school theater competition. Given the subject matter and the effort it required for me to put into my costume and makeup, in hindsight I should have entered the monologue into technical theater instead of just the serious monologue category. I played a middle-aged woman who’d been around the block several times and whose body bore all the reminders. Specifically, the role called for age makeup, a very long facial scar, and for most of my exposed skin to be covered in temporary tattoos, including one I had to customize of a cross on the palm of my hand. Her life and the people in it had left indelible marks on her soul, and so she was only honest in expressing that through the indelible marks upon her body.

Walking away from the newly opened tattoo shop with nothing physical to show for my visit there, I looked at my arms, marked as the rest of my body is by Irish genetics and many joyful, fun seasons in the sun. These marks, never something I cared to cover in the first place, inspired in me feelings of pride and human solidarity after an unfortunate encounter with a white supremacist group forced me to try to explain racism to my children, who were then toddlers.

“There are some people who hate others just because they have different skin color. In this case, these people hate other people just for having brown skin.”

“Mommy, they hate you, too!” my son piped up. “You have brown freckles!”

The wavy, symmetrical “tiger stripes-” as my husband sometimes calls them- that span my abdomen serve as permanent reminders of those life-changing months when I carried and gave birth to my children. Something resembling a comet and its tail cuts a path across my left calf, an eternal reminder of my teenage hijinks.

Here and there, I’m dotted with marks few children in this age of immunizations for everything may ever have. It was Halloween, and I was stir-crazy. Having only barely recovered from the chicken pox, I was determined to celebrate with all the gusto a four year old could muster.

Unfortunately, my brother came down with it just in time to rule out his participation.

In fact, it can be said that nature began its work marking me since before I was born, with two birthmarks. If my son ever wants “Mom” tattooed on him, nature’s already done that, equipping him with birthmarks in the same places almost perfectly matching mine.

So I figured as I headed home that I had no need for any artificial body art. Each mark nature has given me is like a tattoo. It represents something to me and has a story. My skin is already a work of art, and as my life begins to show in smile and worry lines, I figure it’s still a work in progress.