We all have different opinions on tattoos. I like to think of them as expressions of our lives, permanently etched onto our skin to act as palpable memories of past passions, or simply timeless statements of beauty. But tattoos don’t have to have any meaning – or they can; so long as it is something you are happy to have chosen to be marked indelibly on your skin, that is all that matters.

I wrote this poem before I got my first tattoo; I hadn’t booked an appointment before I expressed these thoughts on the process. And now, looking back on my words after the dermis of my inner wrist has been pierced, I wonder whether my sentiments would have been altered had I written this piece more recently. Getting a tattoo was a life-altering, and life-affirming experience; I hope at least some of that is embedded as deeply into this poem as the roman numerals are in my skin.

Stitching

I hold your heartbeat in my hand, 

Watching ventricle pound ventricle

Turning atria to deep purple bruising

in Siamese beating,

Like some perverse Newton's cradle.

As she 

Taking fountain nib to skin

Embellishes me with solitary figures;

Two: too small, feeble things

Of life, and then

Of breath.

 

Ink stinging in sharp penetrations of surrender,

feeding wrist to wrist of corrosive chain;

I am still here, still I am

Tearing skeins of auburn hair in these

pathetic penetrations of dermis,

And stringing words, like glass beads, across the ribbon of my murmurs

 

The resilient beat of your spirit 

still pounding into my palm;

Do-dum do-dum

A tender squeeze back, and out pour

this condiment of compliments 

this gilted guilt,

this insulate of insulin of topped up courage, 

 

As fountain pen nib takes up liquid vermillion,

A rotarised motorised multitude 

of petite en pointed stab wounds,

Soaking black into my sponge-like skin; 

a bulbous beauregarde of bronchial blossom 

 

And I wish you could have clung to life

Like the cling film that clings

so helplessly 

over these trypophobic indentations of ectoderma

where I have stopped to take casting plaster to the thrumming of your heart

and the indents of your shoulder blades

across the northernmost plateau of our duvet