60 for 60: Yakudoshi

By Kellina Moore

In a pink-painted room, in the throes of grief at my childhood cat dying without being able to say goodbye to him because I was away at college, a kind man wearing a Spirited Away shirt dug a bundle of needles into the thin skin of my wrist and gave me my first tattoo: an outline of a crescent moon in memorial of the cat, who was named Luna. I never wanted to get a tattoo, but in my distress the only thought that comforted me was the idea that I could carry him with me on my body.

In this way, I feel deeply recognized in this piece by Kyoko Mori, “Yakudoshi,” which was published in our forty-third issue. It is not only a deftly compressed history of the practice of tattooing, but also a beautifully written ode to the healing capabilities of memorial tattoos and the powerful, changing friendship of pets.



Yakudoshi

Kyoko Mori

In the mid-1960s, while living in Japan, my mother and I watched a weekly TV drama set in the 18th century. The show’s main character was a samurai magistrate. Every week, as soon as a serious crime—murder or robbery—was reported, the magistrate put away his brocaded kimono, scepter, and sword, donned the short happi coat and dark leggings of a common laborer, and went to live in the neighborhood where the crime had been committed. Working undercover, he would find the guilty person and trick him into confiding his guilt. The confession would always take place on a hot day, so hot that the magistrate-pretending-to-be-a-laborer had to cast off his  happi coat, exposing the huge dragon tattooed on his back. In the next scene, he would be dressed as the magistrate again and seat­ ed on his dais while the criminal was brought in, his hands bound in rope. Every criminal, of course, denied any wrongdoing and    told plausible stories to exonerate himself; none recognized the  magistrate as his erstwhile friend. The magistrate would let the  man talk for a while and then begin to ask probing  questions. When the criminal became flustered by his interrogation, the magistrate would say, ”You and I both know you are lying. Let me tell you what really happened.” Then he would describe how the crime had been committed, using the details the criminal had confided in his friend, the humble laborer.

“How can you know any of this?” the criminal would ask in confusion.

“Because that’s what you told so-and-so the stone-cutter (or rice delivery man or carpenter or lamp-oil man).”

“I don’t know anything about so-and-so,” the criminal would deny.

“Of course you do.” With these words, the magistrate always stepped down from his dais and lumbered toward the criminal, loosening the sash of his kimono, thrusting his arms out of the sleeves, and turning his exposed back to the unlucky, foolish man. “Take a good look at this tattoo,” he roared. “Do you recognize it? The humble stone-cutter you confided in was me.”

No criminal had a rebuttal to this revelation. Each cowered in the corner while the magistrate pronounced him guilty and handed down the sentence. As the condemned man was lead away, the camera zoomed in on the dragon tattoo one last time before the magistrate pulled up his kimono, tightened his sash, and squared his shoulders—looking pleased, heroic, and wise.

Because my mother and I did not know anyone who was actually tattooed, I believed, for a long time, that acquiring tattoos was something people used to do, like carrying swords and wearing kimonos every day. At eight or nine, I didn’t fully understand the show’s premise, or the social commentary it implied about class: the dragon tattoo was more distinctive—more true—than the magistrate’s face or voice. The criminal did not recognize the facial features of his supposed friend once he was dressed in the garb of the ruling class, and the cultivated tone of the magistrate was nothing like the crude voice of the laborer he’d pretended to be, but there was no mistaking the lines and the colors of the tattoo.

Nearly 40 years later, I was surprised to discover that the show—outrageous in so many ways—was right about a few things: Japanese tattoos were, and still are, one-of-a-kind, full-body depictions of monsters and heroes. Through the centuries, they’ve been particularly popular among those outside the law, like the Yakuza­ gangsters and gamblers, which explains why the criminals on the show assumed that the tattooed laborer was inclined to be their friend. My mother and I always laughed when the magistrate’s arms popped out of his kimono sleeves in the big revelation scene. It was thrilling and ridiculous at once: deliciously predictable. I had no idea that she and I had only a few more years to spend together, that I would be older than she ever was the summer I remembered our old TV show while contemplating a tattoo.

My cat Oscar had died four years before, when I had just moved to Cambridge from Wisconsin. Though he had a congenital heart defect, I didn’t know about it until I came home one night and found him drooling and coughing—choking, as it turned out, on the fluid that had suddenly filled his lungs. At the emergency veterinary hospital where his lungs were temporarily cleared, the cardiogram showed a wall of muscle growing between the ventricles. “You should take him home,” the veterinarian said. “There’s no treatment for this, but he might have a couple of weeks or even months.” Oscar was only three. I was counting on him to be with me for at least 15 more years. Another woman taught my undergraduate class­ es when all I could do was lie in bed with Oscar and listen to NPR; it took me a whole week to understand that I was hearing the same stories over and over because the station replayed them, not because despair had reduced my life to meaningless monotony. I was inconsolable when Oscar died, two months after that hospital visit.

A few summers later, when a conversation at a party turned to the popularity of tattoos, I told my friends that the only name I could imagine carving on my skin was Oscar’s. If someone had suggested a tattoo right after he died, I might have done it. Up until that summer, I hadn’t thought much about tattoos, although I noticed an increasing number of them at my health club. One in five women, it seemed, sported a small flower on her shoulder, a Chinese pictograph on her nape, or a butterfly on her hip, and it was no longer unusual to see a half-sleeve or knee-to-ankle geometrical design on someone in a spinning class or on an elliptical orbiter. Because our all-women’s health club was three times as expensive as the Bally’s down the street, these were not college students but women in their thirties and forties. Had I consulted the Harris Poll, I would have learned that two years prior, in 2002, 16% of adult Americans, or 28% of those in their thirties and 14 percent in their forties, had a tattoo. The percentage was slightly lower among women than men, but higher among Democrats than Republicans, so one out of five women at “Healthworks” in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was about right. [1]

Still, I was not the kind of person who gravitated toward permanent body decoration. I didn’t even wear make-up, finding it creepy to paint red patches on my cheeks and lips, black lines and purple shades around the eyes, as though my face was a blank slate to be filled in. I loved clothes, but my goal had always been to look elegant in a low-key, modest way. Tattoos, which I associated with tight jeans and leather jackets, struck me as at once too trendy and too obviously transgressive.

According to Japanese superstition, there are bad-luck years when people are prone to misfortune and illness. These years, called Yakudoshi, occur for men at ages 25, 42, and 61; for women at 19, 33, and 37. People in their Yakudoshi are advised against starting a business, building a house, or getting married. Though my mother was 39 when our family moved to a new house, everything changed as if she had fallen into a period of misfortune:  the new house turned out to be dark and cold, she couldn’t make new friends, and she sat thinking all day about what a waste her whole life had been. At our old house, she had been surrounded by friends from the neighborhood who came over every afternoon for tea and needle­ work. She’d grown flowers and vegetables in the garden and in boxes on our verandah. She’d been famous for her energy and cheerfulness. After the move, she scarcely seemed like the same person, not even to herself. Perhaps 39 and 41—the latter the year of her suicide—were her personal Yakudoshi. The depression that descended on her seemed inexplicable and cosmic even though her lack of new friends, my father’s numerous affairs, and my growing up all played a part. Ill have nothing left, she kept writing in her diary, when my children are gone. Like most upper-middle-class women of her generation, my mother didn’t drive a car or work outside the home. She was stuck in the house she hated, trapped inside the same thoughts that occupied her mind day after day: she couldn’t break away from either.

Afraid of repeating her fate, I left Japan at 20 to attend an American college and never went back. By my 30s, I was married and had a tenured teaching job at a small liberal-arts college in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Though my situation was a hundred times better than that of an unhappy housewife in Japan, I felt out of place in the conservative football town, and our house needed serious repairs. My husband and I kept talking about moving to a bigger house or to a different city, but neither of us made any real plans. We couldn’t even buy furniture together, not because we disagreed, but because each of us kept saying, “Well, it’s up to you. Really, I don’t care.” We were mired in our indecisiveness until I finally moved out. I was 39 at our divorce; at 41, I gave up my job and accepted a five-year lectureship at Harvard. I had beaten my mother’s bad luck years by embracing change and striking out on my own.

But I had hedged my bets. I wouldn’t have taken a five-year lectureship just anywhere. Surely, after Harvard, I’d assumed, I would be able to get a tenured job in a city of my choice—not a small town ever again, but a real city. My last summer in Cambridge, with only a year left, I wasn’t so sure. The economy had changed, and many of the universities throughout the country had instated hiring freezes. My friends, who had finished their terms before me, hadn’t gotten permanent jobs. Until the national job lists came out in early October, I wouldn’t know if my chances would be any better.

I needed a ritual to put aside my worries about the future. A journey—a pilgrimage—was my first idea. Every year in my nonfiction workshop, I’d taught Wendell Berry’s “An Entrance to the Woods,” an account of his three-day, solo camping trip in the Daniel Boone National Forest. Berry describes the “melancholy and loneliness” he felt on his first night and argues that all wildernesses are one, that every man (his noun, not mine) enters the wilderness to embrace his helplessness.  His own trip was a continuation of this ancient ritual: “I have come here to enact—not because I want to but because, once here, I cannot help it—the loneliness and the humbleness of my kind. . . It is a kind of death.” [2] Re-reading the essay, I couldn’t believe that I had ever considered myself a strong, independent person without having camped alone in the universal wilderness. If Berry didn’t have a permanent job, he wouldn’t be wasting his summer worrying about the future. He would go into the woods to embrace his lonely, melancholy mortality and move on. There was no reason why I couldn’t do the same.

Everyone I asked told me to check out the White Mountains, so I bought guidebooks and started reading. In Wisconsin, wilderness camping areas, like Newport Beach and Rock Island, are state parks with a handful of campsites you sign up for at the ranger station. The White Mountains take up the whole state of New Hampshire and continue into Maine. The guidebooks mentioned black flies and wood ticks in May and June, mosquitoes in July and August. I started thinking that I should postpone my trip till September; by then, I might have figured out where to go. It was oddly like when my husband and I put off buying furniture or fixing the house. Overwhelmed by too many choices, I sank into the lethargy of no-decision, all on my own this time. In the meantime, friends from various universities emailed and said that the hiring freezes were likely to continue at least another year.

By July, I was having my usual recurring nightmare. In real life, I hadn’t gotten my hair cut since a drunk friend at college trimmed off the bad perm my stepmother’s hairdresser had given me a week before I left Japan: afterward, my hair was so short it stood on end. This haircut revisited me in my sleep almost every night that summer and I woke up wondering how long it would take the hair to grow back. In the two decades I’d had this nightmare off and on, I had never actually dreamed the part where the hair was being cut. If I could will myself to dream the haircut itself, I thought, maybe I could finally free myself from the past and move on. When that didn’t happen and instead, the haircut appeared in combination with my other nightmare—I opened my mouth to speak and huge handfuls of broken teeth fell out (it’s amazing how many teeth I have in dreams)—I knew it was time for action.

The logical next step, of course, was a haircut. It would be a sacrificial act, an attempt to appease the God of Employment. I walked around my neighborhood wondering which salon I would go to—definitely not the one with the spiky-haired mannequin in the window, or the one in the square called “Cost Cutters” (without even a hyphen). I tried to imagine what it would be like not to have long hair. The back of my neck would feel cold. The back of the neck, I once read in a New Age magazine in a waiting room, is the place where our hidden eye—the spiritual eye that supposedly looks back into our past and enables us to walk safely into the future—is located. By cutting my hair, I would give my spiritual eye an unobstructed view of my past, though putting up the hair or pulling it back into a ponytail might do the same thing. I couldn’t remember the breathing exercises the article had recommended to improve the vision of this eye; instead, I thought of Oscar. When I took him to the vet the final time—on Easter  morning, as it turned out—the woman who had taught my classes while he was sick said, “Maybe Oscar’s job was to help you move here. He knows he can leave you now because you’re safe.” Oscar was the guardian of my last move, the cat of my past, my third eye. I could move fearlessly into the future if he was watching my back.

The word “tattoo” comes from “tattow,” which means “to mark” in the native language of Tahiti—where members of Captain Cook’s crew were the first Europeans to encounter tattoos. In Tahiti and throughout Polynesia, both men and women had tattoos that depicted waves, whales, fish, mythical beasts, masked faces, leaves, arrows, flowers, stars, and repeated patterns resembling textiles, applied all over the body and sometimes on the face in black ink made from candlenut. They were status symbols, acquired at rite-of-passage ceremonies to invite good fortune. In Samoa, a man could not marry or speak at a public assembly until he had his tattoos; till then, he could only perform menial tasks given to children. In Borneo, tattoos on the hand were believed to illuminate the soul’s passage in the afterlife. At the River of the Dead, every soul had to show its tattooed hand to the guardian spirit, Maligang, before it was allowed to cross on a log to the other shore. If souls without hand tattoos tried to cross the river, Maligang rolled and tipped the log, causing them to fall into the water where they were eaten by maggots. [3]

Some of the crewmen on Cook’s and other Polynesian expeditions acquired tattoos; those who learned to administer them opened tattoo shops in port towns across Europe after they retired from sailing. The association of tattoos with sailors, and the various motifs of anchors and ships, originated with these tattoo artists. Tattoos had been virtually unknown  in  the  Western  world  until then, since the practice—used to identify slaves, criminals, and mercenaries  by the  Greeks  and Romans—was banned in 787 AD by Pope Hadrian, who  considered  it  barbaric and inhumane.  The Old Testament was also widely believed to forbid tattoos: “Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you” (Leviticus 19:28).

In Japan, as in ancient Greece and Rome, tattoos were first used as marks of shame. Throughout the feudal years, criminals were tattooed on their arms with the names of the cities where they were arrested and jailed. If the crime was considered especially heinous, the pictograph for “dog” or “evil” was placed on the perpetrator’s forehead, forever identifying him as an outcast. But when a popular Chinese novel, Suikoden, whose tattooed heroes battled a corrupt government, was translated into Japanese in the 18th century, tattoos became a vogue among firemen, laborers, gangsters, and gamblers. The colorful full-body depictions they favored were based on the woodblock print illustrations of the novel. Each design signified a particular virtue—courage, devotion, loyalty, etc.—which, by being tattooed with it, the individual adopted as part of himself.

Tattoos have evoked either reverence or revulsion, little in between, in most cultures up till now. In 1862, when middle and upper class French and Italians abhorred the practice, the Prince   of Wales (later King Edward VII) visited the Holy Land and had the Jerusalem Cross tattooed on his arm to  mark his pilgrimage. In 1882, his sons, the Duke of Clarence and the Duke of York (later King George V), were taken to a tattoo master on their tour of Japan to get dragon tattoos on their arms; on their way back to England, they stopped over in Jerusalem, where they visited the same tattooist who had given their father his Jerusalem cross 20 years before. This trinity of crosses in the English royal family existed simultaneously as the crosses many French and Italian convicts tattooed on their chests alongside daggers, hearts, and skulls, signifying martyrdom, vengeance, heartbreak. We—Americans in the 21st century—may be the first people to be somewhat casual about our tattoos, to think of them mostly as decoration. In many cultures in which tattoos were associated with magic, animals were the most frequent subject matter, expressing the tattooed person’s desire to become identified with the spirit of his or her totem animal.

I didn’t know any of this until later. Unlike when I was planning my supposed White Mountains excursion, I didn’t read books or visit websites while considering the tattoo.  There was no need. Once I thought of Oscar as my guardian, getting his image tattooed on the back of my neck —where he could always watch out for me—eclipsed all thoughts of haircuts and pilgrimages. I knew, right away, what the tattoo should look like: a cat curled into the letter “O,” with his face and forelegs at the bottom, his body and tail completing the rest of the circle. Because Oscar was a Siamese cat, long and thin, the image would be halfway between realistic depiction and symbolic stylization. It would resemble the Japanese family crest, traditionally embroidered on the back collar (over the back of the neck, where my tattoo would be) of a formal kimono. A circular pattern of a flower or leaf, the traditional crest identifies the wearer as belonging to the clan of the chrysanthemum, the wisteria, the oak, etc. Mine, linking me to the clan of the Siamese cat, would also be a pun: O-scar. My boyfriend, who is an artist, made several ink sketches based on my description. I had him draw one on the back of my neck with a ballpoint pen to decide how large the image should be.

Though I was as afraid of needles as I was of black flies, wood ticks, and mosquitoes, the few women I asked at the health club assured me that getting a tattoo didn’t really hurt. “More like a sting than a stab,” they said. ”After a few minutes, you get used to it.” They also said that the back of the neck would be much less sensitive than the wrist, the ankle, or the fingers.

A couple of weeks into my tattoo contemplation, my friend Mako and I went to our favorite boutique in Cambridge for their mid-summer sale. She was one of the few friends I had told. While I was trying on a dress, she said, “If you really do get a tattoo, you can wear your hair up to show it off. That dress would look great with your cat tattoo.”

The owner of the boutique, Zelda, asked, “You’re going to get a tattoo?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I’m considering it.”

“Where would you go to get one?”

“I haven’t thought about that yet.”

“Ellen has some beautiful tattoos on her back,” Zelda said, mentioning one of the women who worked for her. “She’s not here today, but you can call and ask her when she comes in.”

I decided on the spot, sight unseen: if I went through with my plans, I would go to Ellen’s tattooist. She was in her fifties and, like all the women who worked at the boutique, very stylish. If Zelda said her tattoos were beautiful, they had to be.

On the phone a few days later, Ellen gave me the name of her tattooist in Salem, New Hampshire, an hour away by car. “The drive’s worth it,” she assured me. “He’s a nice guy with a fine-arts degree, a family man. You don’t want to go to some shady character. This guy is a real artist.”

When I made the tattoo appointment, I didn’t tell anyone. I left my house with a folder containing the money, my boyfriend’s final sketch, and six photographs of Oscar. I brought maps and atlases, too, because I was nervous about getting lost. I had driven through New Hampshire before but never stopped there. But it was the last week of August, the traffic wasn’t bad in the middle of the day, and the tattoo guy’s directions were impeccable.  In less than 40 minutes, I was in Salem, on Broadway, the street I was looking for.

Just like Broadway in Green Bay, this small-town Broadway was a street of motorcycle bars, auto-parts stores, and muffler repair shops. I passed two other tattoo parlors before I came to the gray, one-story frame house with a painted wooden sign up front. The name of the business, Tatu, was written in black, surrounded by rainbow-colored parrots. The tiny, gravel parking lot had two big cars; my Beetle barely fit into the last spot. The steps leading to the front porch were tilted, like those at the house I had shared with my ex-husband in Green Bay. I didn’t think to ring the bell because the slightly skewed front door so vividly reminded me of ours, which was never locked after my husband and I lost the last key that actually fit the lock. For three or four years, we talked about calling a locksmith but never did.

The door opened into a living room crowded with old furniture and knick-knacks.

“Hi, I’m here for my appointment,” I called toward the dining room—beyond a white plaster archway—where I heard some noises.

The guy who came out was my age, with graying hair pulled back into a ponytail. In his jeans, Harley-Davidson T-shirt, and cowboy boots, he looked like the post-hippie, aging motorcycle guys with whom my husband had attended high school. Even the tattoo on his forearm, an abstract design resembling an indigo-colored net, might have been on one of their arms. It occurred to me, though, that I never saw guys like this in Cambridge.

“I’m Mark,” he said. “I’m running a little late with the tattoo I’m working on now. If you don’t mind waiting… ” He pointed to the brown couch set against the living room wall. “It could be another hour.”

After he went back to the dining room, which had apparently been converted into the tattoo room, the noise resumed—a kind of whining hum, like a dentist’s drill. A woman was chatting about her grandchildren’s summer visit. Someone else was in the room—there was another male voice besides Mark’s. From where I sat on the couch, I couldn’t see either of them. I wasn’t sure who was get­ ting tattooed, the grandmother or the other guy. When all the talking stopped, the machine was surprisingly loud. I knew how a tattoo worked: the needle inserted the ink just under the skin where it couldn’t be rubbed off. There wouldn’t be much blood because the needle didn’t go very deep. But I hadn’t considered the noise. At the dentist’s, even to get my teeth cleaned, I asked for laughing gas.

The air conditioner was on, rattling in the window near the front porch. Next to it was a white leather armchair, with one arm removed. A mannequin dressed in a black leather mini-skirt and a red bustier stood in the corner of the living room, holding a taxidermist’s bobcat on a leash, with a stuffed pheasant perched at her feet. Another mannequin—just a head with a blue wig and a leopard­ skin hat—stared from the top of the TV console. The fish that had lived inside the small round fish bowl still filled with water and pebbles, also on the TV console, must have died recently. All the coffee tables and end tables in the room were covered with black binders, tattoo magazines and books, plastic skulls, and rubber tarantulas. A green plastic E. T. doll held out an orange candy dish, with no candy.

. I opened one of the binders on the coffee table closest to me. “Tribal,” the title page said. Inside, there were Celtic Crosses, whale riders, thorny bracelets, Native American chieftains with their head­ dresses, all drawn in black ink. Other binders contained—some of them in color—the Statue of Liberty, the American flag, Elvis, dragons, ballerinas in pink tutus, Jesus, circus clowns, skunks, naked women, and Chinese pictographs. Larger versions of these designs covered every wall of the living room, four or five pictures in vertical columns up to the ceiling. They were displayed along with a few photographs, one of which showed a tattoo on a woman’s chest: a red rose twined around a black cross, the vines climbing the sides of the breasts, toward the nipples covered in silver studs. Other photos featured men’s backs and buttocks with dragon designs like the magistrate’s from the Japanese TV show. Most of the photographs and drawings were small—five-by-seven or eleven-by-thirteen inches but there was one life-sized drawing of a green-faced vampire leaning toward a woman’s neck, which he had just bitten. The vampire’s features were unmistakably the tattooist’s own: mild-looking arched eyebrows and blue eyes, a medium-sized nose, a small mouth regular features that made him good-looking in an unremarkable and reassuring way, a family man with an M.F.A. The only thing he had changed in the self-portrait, besides the green skin, were the two fangs sticking out of his mouth.

I was glad I had brought my boyfriend’s sketch. Mark was clearly a skilled draftsman but his taste was not to be trusted. If I had tried to describe the image to him, he might have come up with an emblem that resembled the Batman logo or a skull-and-daggers better suited to a pirate flag than to the back of my neck. Still, he must have a sense of humor—the self-portrait had to be meant in an ironic way—and I hadn’t come all this way to be scared off by tacky home decorations. Since, in my haste and nervousness, I had forgotten to bring a book, I picked up one of the numerous bird books stacked up on the coffee table. I was looking through my second book, 45 minutes later, before it occurred to me that Mark wasn’t necessarily a bird-watcher. The books were there to provide tattoo inspiration.

The grandmother came out of the tattoo room wearing a black, flapper-style dress. Her short hair was gray; her upper arm was covered with a large white bandage. “I was nervous before my first one, too,” she said as she went out the door.

Mark and I spent the next 20 minutes in the living room, trying to come up with an acceptable copy, on paper, of my boyfriend’s sketch. Bringing the photographs turned out to be a good idea. Mark wasn’t familiar with Siamese cats. He kept rounding out Oscar’s head and torso. “I know he looks kind of rat-like in the sketch,” I had to tell him. “But see, he was like that in real life. He was beautiful, but he didn’t look like regular cats.”

Every time I apologized for asking him to re-draw the picture, Mark said, “That’s okay. You’re going to have it for life.”

Once the picture was satisfactory, we went into the other room. A young man with dreadlocks, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, was sitting on a small couch. He had knee-to-ankle tattoos that looked like interlocking arrowheads. Addressing this young man more than me, Mark explained how he was going to use an inked transparency to copy the picture he’d drawn onto the back of my neck.

“You must be an intern,” I said as I sat down in the tattoo chair—a sturdy leather affair.

“I’m an apprentice,” the young man said.

After tracing the picture on my skin, Mark gave me a hand mirror to examine it. My chair faced the large mirror on the wall, so I turned around.

“Is this exactly where you want it—the right size and every­ thing?” he asked.

I tilted the hand mirror but all I could see was the wall next to the large mirror. I had never mastered this two-mirror operation; I could only do it alone, when I wasn’t nervous. Still, I had made him re-draw the picture five times already. We had measured it with a ruler—two inches in diameter—before he had copied it onto my neck. I hated coming across like a nervous, picky person. Besides, trusting what I couldn’t see was an important part of this ritual. “Yeah, it’s fine,” I nodded to Mark.

He handed me back all the photographs except one, which he put on the table next to his tools. “I’m going to look at this photo­graph,” he said, “to make the coloring right.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be colors besides indigo. But he was already opening the packet that contained the sterilized needle. I didn’t see any colors in the tattoo on his own arm. By coloring, I concluded, he meant shading. If not, I had to trust that he knew what he was doing.

I lined up the extra photographs on the small table between my chair and the wall with the mirror.

“Here comes the easy part,” Mark said. “Really, getting the picture right is the main thing.” He explained how he would sterilize the already sterile needle before putting it in the machine and how he would throw it out at the end so each needle was only used once. “Now, try not to move,” he said.

“This is your cat?” the apprentice asked, pointing at the photographs.

“Yeah, he died four years ago,” I said. “I’m getting a tattoo in his memory.”

“My wife and I have a pet iguana,” he said. “He’s a couple of feet long and he eats pizza.”

“Is this going to hurt?” I asked Mark when he turned on the machine.

“No,” he said. “More like a sting.”

For the first couple of minutes, it did hurt, though not as much as I’d feared. There was a burning, prickling sensation, not a single isolated sting. At the dentist, I always worried that the dentist would suffer a sudden heart attack; his hand would seize or slip, and he would gouge my tongue with the drill. But Mark was my age, not old enough to have a heart attack on the job and, even if he did, a needle on the back was nothing like a drill in the mouth. Anyway, the advantage of getting a tattoo on the back was that I didn’t have to look at the needle. I could have followed Mark’s movements in the mirror in front of me, but I kept my eyes on the photographs of Oscar on the table.

Oscar was so light on his feet, he could jump straight from the floor to my shoulder. His favorite trick was to unroll the toilet paper with his paw and carry it, in his mouth, out of the bathroom and all over my apartment, so I would come home to find my kitchen and living room TP’d, as if after a high school home-coming game. On the 20-hour drive between Green Bay and Cambridge, broken up into three days, he was quiet for all of 10 minutes, combined, but he never minded hotel rooms—he settled down on the bed to watch TV with me as soon as we were unpacked. The only real vacation I’d ever taken, not a work-related trip or a visit to friends, but an occasion when I went to a city where I knew no one, just to see the sights, was with Oscar, a few months after we’d moved out East. We drove to Western Massachusetts and stayed in a pet­ friendly motel in a small town named Hadley for a week. I went bird-watching all day and came back to have a take-out dinner with Oscar every evening.

The needle had stopped hurting at all. Mark paused and said he was going to use “powder blue” for Oscar’s eyes. He had already colored his body “cream, almost mauve.” Five more minutes and we were done. The apprentice noticed me struggling with the hand mirror and held it at the right angle so I could see. What Mark meant by powder blue and mauve were not what I usually understood by those words, in a good way. The blue was only slightly brighter than the indigo of the outline; it actually brought out the eyes so they looked watchful. The “cream, almost mauve” was scarcely distinguishable from the color of my skin—just enough to suggest movement or fluidity in the bend of Oscar’s back. I had somehow expected the tattoo to be covered with a scab, but except for the slight reddening and puffiness of the skin around it, the image already looked the way it would for the rest of my life. Oscar sat at the base of my neck, slightly crouched, his long tail in a circle.

According to the Harris Poll, only 17 percent of Americans with tattoos regret getting them. The reason most often cited for their regret is “because of the person’s name in the tattoo” (16 percent). Among those with no regrets, 26 percent report feeling more attractive after their tattoo and 29 percent more rebellious, but very few feel more intelligent (five percent), healthy (four percent), or athletic (three percent).

For ten days, I kept my tattoo covered with a big sterilized band­ age, as Mark had instructed. Once the bandage was off, there was nothing to call attention to my tattoo (and invite questions like ”What happened to your neck?”). People didn’t always notice it even if I was wearing my hair up or in a ponytail. For nearly a month, I could feel its outline, like a slightly raised line of embroidery stitches.

After the skin became smooth again, I still imagined invisible threads fastening me to my memories, not only of Oscar, but also of Green Bay. I hadn’t run away from the tattoo house because what I found inside was only a larger concentration of the bric-a­ brac I had lived among in the small, working-class town where I had once made a home—a refuge from my Japanese childhood and my mother’s unhappiness. For 15 years in Green Bay, I had met my friends for breakfasts and lunches at the “Main Street EAT,” our favorite diner, which was filled with clown figurines and clown paintings of all sizes, shopped at the local department store where one year, the Easter special was a clock with the Last Supper paint­ ed on its face, and visited the homes of neighbors with plastic squirrel and deer ornaments arranged on perfectly manicured lawns. The college where I taught had a grotto with a life-sized statue of the Virgin Mary placed among rocks, in a white plaster shell that looked like a bathtub. Though I hoped not to end up in a city like Green Bay or Salem again, I felt ready to leave Cambridge—their opposite, a city of extreme education, good breeding, and icy New England reserve. I didn’t feel more rebellious, exactly, but after the tattoo I was more ready than ever to let go of a life I was only meant to keep for five years.

The October morning I went to the post office to mail my thirty-three job applications, my hair was up because I had just gone running, and Oscar was watching my back. Although there were other offers in the next two months, in December I accepted a tenured position in Northern Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. I liked the people I’d be working with, the teaching load was manageable, and I had always loved D.C.—a big city but more reassuringly Middle America than those in the North-East. When I flew down in March to look for a place to  live, I walked into the third­ floor apartment with six east-facing windows and trees outside, in a co-op building near the National Cathedral, and the other  ten places I’d seen that morning simply fell away.

I didn’t necessarily get the apartment because of the tattoo, or because that next day happened to be my birthday. But I was beyond any woman’s Yakudoshi now, and like the tattoo, or the job offer, or the afternoon I visited the breeder in Waukesha, Wisconsin, and chose Oscar from the four kittens inside a pet carrier that looked like a miniature tent—something I would do again even if I fore­ saw that he, and not the others, would get sick—I knew exactly what I wanted.

[1] Harris Poll, cited in “Tattoo Facts and Statistics” on www.vanishingtattoo.com.

[2] Berry, Wendell. “An Entrance to the Woods.”

[3] The information on the history of tattoos comes from Steve Gilbert’s Tattoo History: A Source Book (New York: Juno Books, 2000).