Sign here ...

Waiting at a Delta gate last week to board a return flight from Salt Lake City to Philadelphia, I saw a middle-aged passenger with an interesting approach to words as tattoos. Both of his forearms were covered with autographs in tattoo form. I couldn’t make out any of the signatures – they were the typical scrawls and clumps of cursive letters that people use to sign their name. The effect was powerful and striking. Although that autograph book of the flesh was not what I have in mind for myself, it still got me to thinking. What if the passenger in the bowler hat was a writer and all of the signatures were of authors he admired? I saw a different sort of signature today on a tour of the Pearl S. Buck house, courtesy of Linda Wisniewski, a friend and writer who recently became a docent there. Buck’s signature was in Chinese – Chinese was her first language – and displayed in golden stained glass lit by a fall afternoon’s sun. It was hard to miss, just like the passenger’s armful of names.

The Ants Go Marching …

I love tattoos, at least, the creative, artful ones: I’m not a fan of the skull-with-the-eyeballs-popping-out motif. If I were twenty-something again, I’d probably get a sleeve – or two – of a jungle scene, full of tigers and pythons and macaws. But given how far from 20 I am, I’m content with the shoulder and upper arm ink I have. Or am I? After each tattoo, I’ve sworn I’ve had the last. But a year or two ticks by, and I see another intriguing design - and there I go again. Ever since the last one – a line of ants marching around my ankle – I’ve been pondering a tattoo of just words, a significant phrase, a meaningful sentence. But what? At a recent writers retreat, I met Jess Cooper, who has a striking tat in Middle Earth script: Not all who wander are lost. It was exactly the kind of tattoo I had in mind. Short and pithy, and from a literary classic. But Jess already has it. My mission then is to find some other phrase that resonates with me. Thus I reactivate my blog after several years on hiatus, and I explore tattoos and words until I’ve settled on just the right maxim. If you’ve got words in a tattoo, what are they?