Twenty Square Feet of Skin (21st Century Essays) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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To consider my tattoos we must first consider skin. Skin is our barrier against the world, enveloping our body so that we won't lose our precious water and evaporate like dew. The outer layer, the epidermis, lacks blood vessels and survives on oxygen alone, although it needs very little of it because many of its cells are already dead. A skin cell lives for a fortnight and is then pressed upward through the process of desquamation to flake off and float around your house as dust.

The strata of our skin resemble slices of the earth, where twenty-five to thirty layers of skin cells separate us from the outside world. Scratch your epidermis and you might flake off a few dead cells, but cut into your dermis and you'll bleed and slap your hand to the cut in pain. It is in the dermis that tattoo ink is deposited and where, as the years of a life progress, the ink sinks like heavy water, fading away through layers of skin like a figure retreating into shadow.

There are marks that fate applied to our bodies: freckles, moles, and scars-from falls, mean housecats, sharp kitchen knives, and slippery rocks in the water holes where we learned to swim-and then there are marks we etch into our skin deliberately: razor nicks, piercings, tattoos.

The average adult lives within twenty square feet of skin, roughly the size of a large baby blanket, although shaped, of course, not like a blanket but like a human. A big canvas. Skin covered in ink doesn't much resemble our naked dead layers. It looks like snake and bird feather, scale and leather.

Tattoos are often the language of the dead because skin can speak for us when we are gone. Sailors hoped their ink would identify their bodies if they drowned at sea. Salt and water do horrible things to a body, erasing all personality, removing eyes, wiping faces clean, but even stretched and water-logged a tattoo remains locked in flesh.

Anchors, pirate queens, bleeding hearts-all offered something like an ID card. For the inked mummies of the Euro-Asian steppe and the bodies of the Iceman and an Egyptian priestess . . . what did their dots and dashes and their swirling chimerical animals mean to their owners? Perhaps only that they had names, even in death.

I am certain that I began drawing on myself early. I drew on all things, so it seems fitting that my skin was also my canvas. In school I doodled on my hands and arms, writing notes that blossomed into flowers and vines. But that ink scrubbed away or smeared off on my cheek in the night. Like most kids who grew up in the country, I was checked with scars on my arms and legs from bike accidents, barbed wire, the blade of the pocketknife I had stolen from my father, a fishhook, a mean pine bough, the barbs of blackberry and raspberry bushes.

My skin, if I consider it, is not particularly special. It is neither oily nor dry. It isn't a large hide, not quite twenty square feet, and beyond the scratches and scrapes of childhood it has escaped real damage, enduring only moderate acne during adolescence and again during a rough spot in my late twenties.

But I am inscribed with images, electric with ink. See me naked, or moving through the water, swimming in clear lakes, see me in a sundress or walking the trash to the curb, see me stretching my muscles toward the sun, see me showering off the sweat of the day, and see my arms and legs illustrated, my back and foot patterned, my hipbone stamped with pigment, my shoulder opening wings of ink.