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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 a slice 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 applies to our bodies, freckles, moles, and scars from falls, mean house cats, 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 bites, 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. With the inked mummies of the Euro-Asian steppe, or 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 likely 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 grow 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.

I am the poet of the body,
And I am the poet of the soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself –the latter I translate into a new tongue.

—Walt Whitman

Whitman might have seen tattoos in the hospital wards on the limbs of those dying boys that he tended with letters and words and ice cream. Martin Hildebrandt, a tattoo artist from New York City, enlisted in the Army of the Potomac and was known to ink men so that their bodies might be identified. There were no dog tags in the Civil War, and despite a six-year program undertaken in 1865 by the Quartermaster General to locate and inter the dead, only half of the war’s fatalities were identified.

The first tattoo, a cross on my hipbone. My mother accompanied me because I was under eighteen, and she was trying, with her first and most willful child, to be cool. She talked the artist down to inking me with something no bigger than a quarter. It was over before I understood the pain. The waistline of my jeans wore it off over the course of a two-week hiking trip that I embarked on just after getting the tattoo. It was cloudy and mosaicked before I had it reworked four months later when I sat for my second tattoo. The man let me tattoo myself while he took a break to relax his hands. He guided me through the process as his feet pumped the machine.

You came into the world perfect, my mother muttered, after each tattoo, perhaps in protest.

Consider pain. Consider the skin under pain. That organ is the perfect vehicle for agony. It can be burned, cut, rubbed off, frozen, lashed, electrified, beaten, pierced, branded. There is pain in the skin; there has to be for us to walk through the world and know fire and ice and to pick up things like marbles and bowling balls and to tie shoelaces or zip up a dress. It is our barrier but it screams to us; those nerves woven through the dermis shoot electric warnings to our distant brains. Many tortures have been enacted upon skin. The saints at their martyrdom. The Death by a Thousand Cuts. The mind has dreamed up and then executed a thousand violations of that greatest of organs, that membrane that protects the individual from the universe.

Perhaps tired of traditional methods, or simply crueler than the rest, the Byzantine Emperor Theophilos had the brothers Theophanes and Theodore tortured for their protest against Iconoclasm. Over the course of two days he had their faces tattooed with twelve lines of his metrically correct although artistically unsuccessful poetry. The brothers survived and continued their protests. Later, when they were venerated as saints, they became known as the Grapti, the “written upon” or “the inscribed.”
There is a comma missing in the poem on my left leg. I didn’t notice it was missing until a few months later. I have a very casual relationship with commas and am surprised I took note. Sometimes I draw it in with pen but to have it fixed permanently seems so fussy.

Stay together [missing comma] learn the flowers, go light.

—Gary Snyder

There is a line through the dark image on my left shoulder that a beloved cat tore as he escaped from my arms and into the yard at dusk. That too will remain while the image on my back simply fades away. That tattoo, a Celtic knot, sits on the sliver of skin that is exposed by my shirt hiking up my back as I lean to weed or plant. It has faded so that when I am deep summer tan it appears more like an elaborate birth mark than a tattoo; it is a memory of a deliberate thing I said once to my skin forever.

The pain of fading, the pain of mistake, is not as bad as the pain at its origin under the needle. Have you ever picked a scab and pulled its crust too deep? Have you felt the bite of a razor on your anklebone and a rush of sweet sharp something too? Can there be love without this exposure, or growth without that tingling ache in the bones? There are scales for pain but they aren’t accurate. Each body has its own measure, and year-to-year, place-to-place on our hide, it changes. Consider the inside of your elbow or the smooth skin along your ribs, both dangerously sensitive to the needle, so that some artists won’t touch you there for your first tattoo. Now run your hands over your deltoid and biceps, the rounded head of your shoulder and the meaty part of your upper arm, the skin on your calf. Thick and distant from bone. Here the needle sinks without getting too close to the tender parts. Here you’ll not feel it shake your skeleton.

Sometimes a cat scratch. Sometime a burn. The needle will bite and then radiate out as the minutes become hours until the whole thing is a flooded field of red raw pain. A tattoo’s pain can ache downward from the dermis to the muscle fiber to the bone. It’ll start to move. Or maybe that’s the pain from not moving, from sitting and becoming canvas. But even if you stretch, even if the artist offers you a Coca-Cola for the sugar rush, even if he leaves you for a while to smoke a cigarette or answer the phone, the skin will buzz. The needle vibrates like bees in the grass. Its hiss shocks you at first and you’ll jump, but that’s just the beginning. Then you’ll know how it hurts. Then you’ll know how a good artist will start light and then press deeper or start with the single needled outliner and finish with the many needled shader, scratching in ink instead of drawing it like a fine-tipped pen across your bloody skin.

But the pain is essential. It releases endorphins that flood you with something like love and joy. A two-beer buzz. Sex. French fries and milkshakes. The good stuff. And after a while you won’t be able to describe the pain but you’ll know that it is a key and the release is worth the scratch.

Unscrew the locks from the doors!
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

—Walt Whitman

I am an addict. I think I should say that. I fall hard for things, and I’ve had to cut them out, too. Booze and cigarettes are gone now. I have to watch that I don’t get too involved with pastimes or specifics. Too interested. I’ll pick at a scab until it becomes a scar. I’ll keep looking for that sweet response. I know that.

Some people get addicted to tattoos. I have seven, the large one on my left arm being what I consider now my last. The pain was never that much of a high for me. Except during that last one, when, like a terrible night of drinking when you cheat on your beloved and crash your car and then swear never to touch the bottle again, I found the edge of my tolerance for the needle. That tattoo ink was cut with witch hazel to help me heal, but O! the sting! And the session lasted nine hours, instead of the normal two four-hour sessions, because the artist was leaving the next day. He began in the meaty part of my arm and finished in tender bits—my armpit, my elbow bone, until I rang with pain—inking in an image from an illustrated edition of Leaves of Grass, women holding babies, men pushing plows, birds breaking into the sky of my shoulder. Driving home delirious, I wondered if I might not be breaking the law.

Consider inspiration. Is it born in a dream or myth or pretty picture you saw once? I rolled my tattoos around in my mind for years before they spread out on my skin, except for one. The eagle on my shoulder landed on me.

There are seasons marked on my body like a castaway’s notches to record the day. The Celtic cross and knots. The poets: Jeffers (his red-tailed hawk), Snyder, and Whitman.

In the season of the eagle tattoo, my heart was freshly broken and I was driving out west hoping hard to find adventure, or at least something other than the snow of another New England winter. Over the mountain passes of the Rockies I prayed for my car’s engine. I wrote in cheap motel rooms and hoped someone would text or call me, but my phone was silent. To anyone who asked, I told lies about who I was and what I was doing, as if I were trying on different skins, but the one thing that stayed with me, state to state, dawn to dusk, were the eagles. I saw them or they saw me and followed me west, their white hooded heads sharp against the sky.

I joked that I would get an image of one of them inked on my arm. Joked to the tracks of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers. Joked to the stale air in my car.

In Utah I settled in to a nest of a motel room a few minutes away from the gates of Zion. I could see the rim of some red rock formation from the window near my desk. The sun cast over its face like clock hands counting away hours. And the eagles hung above it, screaming silent in the desert sky. No, not screaming. Yipping. Hawks scream. Eagles yip like beagles.

When I couldn’t write a word I drove. My car red with dust, I followed a brochure’s map up a dirt road on the other side of Zion. It was the last day of the year. A man in a silver pickup truck looked down, worried, into my window as we passed on the tight road. As he drove down to the main highway I saw that his bed was full of hound dogs, their noses pressed to the grates of their cage.

The road ended or seemed to end at the gates of Grafton, a historic site, a ghost town whose fields were still farmed by a rancher down valley. Walking the main road, I felt like I’d been there before. Miles Romney, an architect sent by Brigham Young to oversee the construction of the St. George Temple, was housed in Grafton while final plans were drawn up. He wrote in his journal “when I studied Milton’s Paradise Lost in school I never intended to spend the last part of my life in it.” The settlement spread out on the skirts of the Virgin River with the red cliffs behind and the clear sky above. Red, green, blue cut boldly into the earth. But it wasn’t beauty that made me pause, for the West has plenty of that. I knew those old buildings worn by the desert sun. I knew the church and schoolhouse, the fences and barns.

An eagle circled. Hunting.

Then it came to me, but I didn’t believe myself until I read it in the fine print at the bottom of the historical society’s sign. Grafton had been in several movies, most notably Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The gentle schoolteacher Etta lived in this Paradise, and the outlaws came to her for food and love and shelter. Dusty, Redford, and Newman dragged themselves to the light of that house while the posse, nameless, faceless, bore down on them.

“There are no second acts in American lives,” F. Scott Fitzgerald said, but Butch and Sundance got one by running away and living in Bolivia for over a decade before they were killed. Or not. Lula Parker, Butch’s sister, claimed that he returned to Utah and died there of old age. In the movie they live forever in that long frozen shot as they blast out into the marketplace where the Bolivian Army’s rifles can be heard. There’s no pain in that ending.

I’ve always loved that movie, its evasion and veiled truth. Once I dreamt of Whitman and Galway Kinnell holed up together, bandaging their wounds, talking not of Australia and banks but of the body and the soul. I’ve read that hearing other people’s dreams is boring, but I can’t imagine why. I consider this dreamed scene often: on the count of three the poets ran out into the bullets and were frozen there on the screen.

I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touched from,
The scent of these armpits aroma finer than prayer,
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

—Walt Whitman

My body the only universe I’ll really inhabit. And what have I inked upon it?

I have come to myself empty, the rope
strung out behind me
in the fall sun
suddenly glorified with all my blood.

—Galway Kinnell

I wanted blood in Utah, and tattooing is a bloody art. As the needle tears into the dermis, blood wells up and things get messy. The artist smears your skin with A and D ointment, which helps keep the blood down but not enough; they’ll wipe it away every few minutes with a paper towel so that briefly they can see the image they’re carving.

Imagine having something to write but nothing to write on or with. You go tearing into your desk for a pen and paper. You rattle through all the stuff in your purse, the glove box, and you feel the words pounding on your skull demanding to be inscribed. Eagle. Eagle. Eagle, my skin said. Eagle my skin, I said.

Somewhere between magic and mysticism truth is suspended. Magic is just a trick that you haven’t figured out yet. Mystics are something else entirely. They can talk to God and animals. Their dreams are worth paying attention to. When they die their skin becomes leather. Their bones are good luck. Their poems cause people to sway and see the Virgin Mary or taste spring water on their lips. There isn’t any reason in them, though if there is, it is mythic reason, full-moon thought, and tidal. Theirs is the way of the spirit. They might begin as blank canvases but they become saints.

I don’t believe in magic. I think it’s a silly thing to even have to say. When I was three, my father told me Santa was fake to save me from having to believe a lie. But I believe in the body and the spirit and the skin living on air as it separates us from air, and in things that I don’t understand pulling at me. I can’t really tell you how the tides work but I know they are called by the moon’s gravity and that the lunar cycle tugs at the blood in my belly, too. I don’t speak Eagle but the Eagles told me to get back in my car and drive down Interstate 15 to St. George where I would find a man with ink in his needle on this, the last day of the Year of Our Lord 2009.

Tattoo shops, or parlors, or studios, are not welcoming places to walk into. Like all places that deal in blood, they are often tucked up in the armpits or off to the side of cities, especially nice cities like St. George, where you can see Miles Romney’s beautiful white temple or walk over the tracks of Jurassic reptiles at the Dinosaur Museum. To find a tattoo shop you have to look for one. I followed a bumper sticker to a phone book to a strip mall where the only tattoo parlor open on New Year’s Eve let me slip in as the last skin of the day. The place was tile and Fifties roadster revival, but empty, and the man who inked my shoulder was the owner of the store.

In the past, I had always walked in with artwork, something I had drawn that had been waiting for flesh, but in Utah I knew only the bird and where it would soar on my body. He drew me an eagle and placed it, in temporary ink, with its wings over my upper arm. It wrapped me up lovingly.

First the hair is shaved. Human skin, like that of most mammals, is hairy, even if those hairs are fine and light, and these tiny hairs will get caught in ink and needle. Then the rubbing of alcohol swabs, the cleansing. I settled forward in the chair, my arm outstretched. He assembled his kit. The ink quaked dark in its reservoirs. He banded the needle’s necks to the machine and tapped it to life with his foot. Ointment slathered over the site. He pulled at my shoulder, testing its elasticity, its thickness, its bounce. Then ink into needle and needle into skin, the first touch a cut to form a wing, a test, then faster and longer with each line, until the bird is outlined. Blood wells so ruby, so shocking, dripping in orbs then running all wild with black ink shot through until purple and messy, just bruise.

A tattoo is a wound. Consider that you have just opened yourself to infection on the very surface that is meant to protect you from the world. You are now vulnerable in a way you weren’t thirty minutes ago. The artist cleans the eagle up good and smears it with ointment, then he packs it away under a dressing and tapes the edges shut. The pain has made me excited. I shake as I drive away, back north to my motel. There are lights in the desert. The night is dark already when I arrive and peel the bandage off and gaze into the floor length mirror. The eagle is part blood, part ink.

If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body

—Walt Whitman

First the ink will rise up and the image will be branded on you. Then it’ll scab, but don’t scratch it. It’ll peel, but don’t pull it. One by one the lines will fall away, and you will feel again your skin, smooth but full of ink now. The ink settles heavy in the dermis. Sitting above nerve and fat but below the dead layers that wear off. Deep enough to be forever in you.

Perhaps skin is the best place to be selfish. Under the dermis on our hands and feet there are papillae that extend outward toward the outside world. They press into the epidermis, forming the distinctive hurricanes of our fingerprints. These marks are created in the womb during the first trimester and they remain with us, unchanged, through all seasons. Unique. Pressed in ink, they are our identity. We are known through our skin.

Megan Baxter is a recent graduate of the Vermont College of the Arts. Her first book, The Coolest Monsters, is forthcoming this fall from Texas Review Press.