A few weeks ago I woke up and asked myself: why do I fucking care anymore?
I’ve been getting tattooed since I was 18. Seventeen years. My back is tattooed from top to bottom. Both of my butt cheeks. My stomach, my sides, even my breasts. I have a half sleeve that is one of the most important pieces of my life story. I am a heavily tattooed person.
And yet for years I held a line. Nothing too big or too visible that couldn’t be covered. In my own head, a little sticker there was cute, anything else too in your face not so much.
Why I Held The Line
Not because I judged it on anyone else - I’ve always been attracted to visible tattoos on other people. But for myself, visible meant risk. Corporate jobs. Some restaurants. The State Department, where the environment was male, pale, and Yale enough that even my nose piercing was one of the few visible body modifications. I learned early that certain bodies - specifically mine - had to work harder to be taken seriously, and visible tattoos felt like a variable I could control.
Then I woke up a few weeks ago and couldn’t remember why I still cared.
Why I Stopped
There are National Guardsmen outside my house every time I go for a walk. People are still being disappeared. The world is violent in a way that is completely precedented - we’ve been here before - and I firmly believe it doesn’t have to be. Maybe it was that. Or maybe it’s that I’m six years into working for myself and finally accepted I’d never go back to an office that told me how I had to look.
The Session
So I emailed my favorite artist in DC and said: hey, you got space for me?
He’s usually booked months out.
But there had been a cancellation.
Last Tuesday I walked in with a scan of one of my grandmother’s paintings of an Ensō, a circular form, a Zen circle. In Buddhism it represents enlightenment, strength, the universe. But I didn’t choose it for the symbolism. I chose it because when my mom sent me a folder of my grandmother’s black and white works - she painted in vivid color for most of her life, but I wanted black and white - I opened the email and immediately knew this was the one.
My granny, Teruko Yokoi, was an unknown painter living in the Hotel Chelsea in 1959 with a new baby. In 2025, they named a restaurant after her in that same building. Today, my apartment looks like an art museum because I am the child and grandchild of artists. And now her hand is on my arm.