Blood & Ink

There isn’t much about writing in this post. However, it does happen to be a story about ink.

I now have a tattoo, thanks to Nick McEvoy, an artist from Good Faith Tattooing. A real, painfully applied, not-at-all-temporary, tattoo. A discrete design, small, and on my left inside bicep, a placement where it is usually covered up even by short sleeves, although with some shirts the tips of it are visible. This is my first tattoo, or ‘symbolic image’ as we’ve been calling it at home, and here’s what it looks like today.

It is still raw and scabbed, the skin around it inflamed and red (in some ways an appropriate symbol in and of itself). It is a wound after all, or rather a series of many small, manageable, wounds. The lines you see will become more defined as the surface blood recedes, and the blue segments of the star will change most dramatically as it heals, clearing and becoming a much lighter color.

This design, a two-color pinwheel, is known as the Nautical Star, and tattoos incorporating it are frequently associated with membership in the United States Navy. My late father served in the Navy during World War II, so I’ll lay claim to that related bit of symbolism, but only as a secondary meaning.

For me, the primary meaning of my star is as a navigation guide, as it traditionally was for sailors, symbolizing true north and harking back to the design style used on a compass rose. In particular it represents my guide through life, the light that keeps me on course both day and night, and that is my wife, Penelope Dorneman.

When we learned that Penny would be receiving tiny tattoos as guides for her breast cancer radiation treatment, I volunteered to get a tattoo of my own in sympathy. The dark blades of the pinwheel remind me of the surgeon’s scalpels, the light blue reminiscent of the scrubs of all the medical personnel involved.

(Penny says the blue matches the color of my eyes, and means clear skies ahead.)

Stars are also the origin of all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, and sources of radiant energy in and of themselves.

We are all, as Carl Sagan said, made of star stuff.

Oh, and the little paw print? As readers of this blog may recall from my last post, our dog Ellie has recently been diagnosed with thyroid cancer, and she’ll be undergoing her own surgery and follow-up treatment beginning next week. The paw print that symbolizes her is tucked up close under the arms of the star because Ellie follows my wife, no matter what Penny may be doing.

Follows her even in this.

Thanks for Reading,

Stephen

Steel or Twine

Some days, the things that hold you together - your work, your family, your writing, your health - are solid guy-wires (pun intended), steel cables anchored in concrete, supports that you know you can rely on through good times and bad.

Then there are the other days. Maybe it starts as string of little things – you go to the grocery store for cream because your dog woke you up at two thirty in the morning with an urgent desire to go out, so now you need the cream for coffee to wake you up, and then later, for a white Russian when you can't sleep, and as you're about to enter the store the fire alarms go off and they clear all the patrons before you can buy anything.

Or maybe the string is not so little. You're still struggling with nerve pain from the case of shingles you had back in January. Nobody wants to publish your old stories, and your writing group tells you the latest one has a point of view that's all over the map. Your dog has thyroid cancer. Everything you think you need to do costs money.

Your wife has breast cancer.

So you start feeling that your supports look more like this.

Twine happens.

But after a while you think about things, you talk it over with your wife, and you realize that the cables are all intact – they might be stretching a bit in the storm, you can even hear the steel humming in the wind, but the coiled, tempered metal is strong, the bases heavy and solid.

You have health insurance, from a job where you can sometimes work from home, and a patient, understanding boss. You haven't even touched that emergency fund in the bank. Your dog is under the care of the city's best canine cancer specialists, and most important, your wife's cancer is Stage Zero, which means it was caught so early that some medical authorities don't consider it to be 'worthy' of being called cancer at all.

So you buy a large coffee at Dunkin' Donuts, and contemplate having a glass of wine with dinner. And there's time tonight to rewrite that new story and fix the wandering point of view, and you send those other stories out to a set of different journals.

Steel, not Twine.

Thanks for Reading,

Stephen