tatt for tit

When told that I had a new tattoo on my forearm, my friend CE joked, “Does it say ‘Thug Life’?”

It doesn’t say “Thug Life,” but thuglife is hidden behind the image. My new tattoo is an action shot of Midori, a character from Chikako Urano’s classic 1970s manga, “Attack No. 1,” which was the first manga for girls structured not around romance but athletics: teenaged volleyball players. Midori, my favorite character from the book, is not the protagonist, but embodies much of what I love about girl manga, and girliness in general. In classic manga style, Midori is Japanese, but drawn by Urano with not only the typically manga picture-window eyes, but flowing blonde (white? silver?) hair. I particularly love this image because it shows her in action—she’s going for a set or a kill—but her hair is controlled only by a headband. The hair flowing out behind her doesn’t hinder her athletic aggression, but only enhances it: she’s like a female Samson. I love how her ball-hitting fist balances the pin-uppy leg position and the faggoty bend of the left wrist.

I got the tattoo (by Siri at the great Black and Blue Tattoos in San Francisco) a week ago, and I swear it wasn’t a corny Olympics tie-in, but I guess it could be a cute coincidence. All my tattoos are of girls I’d like to be—Marie Antoinette’s lady-in-waiting, a black butterfy, EnVogue-the-Riveter, a Spanish dancer, an emotional extraterrestrial princess—and this newest one represents a tough kind of femininity I want to embody at this particular moment in my life. I think of this kind of athletic femme as an XXXY girl. Not “XXY”—a butch lady, but "XXXY:" a girl who has a bit of the male chromosome, but is also endowed with an extra feminine chromosome. NOT like Dara Torres, but more like Lolo Jones.

I first got tattooed as an act of wifeyness. My exh-husband is heavily tattooed, and lured me into the world of ink and needles. Tattooing also marked the other end of my wifey identity: I got a forearm tattoo to mark my divorce. My relatively new addiction to collecting girls on my forearms reflects a desire to communicate a certain kind of thuggishness through femininity. A kind of...gay thuggishness, or femme thuggishness. I suppose sailors of the past got panty-clad-butt-thrusting-pouty-lipped gals on their skin to silently pontificate their macho heterosexuality; I am filling my skin with sketched girls of the same genealogy to express my femme homosexuality. These girls are the girls I am inside, floated out to the topmost layer of my skin. I’ve got my own girl-gang. Don’t gangs bind their bond by mixing thumbblood? Well, my sisters are forever with me, on me, sisters born of my own blood and black ink.

My tattoo addiction is an evolution of my adolescent gender dysphoria. When I was 16, I was sure that I was a girl trapped in a boy’s body and did primitive research on gender reassignment at the public librar. I struggled with this confusion—was I just gay or was I transsexual?—through research, both of book and body. Aside from reading through scarily-illustrated medical books, I had also taken to cutting, which I think was a smaller version of prepping myself for the cutting that would produce the ultimate cut that I wasn’t born with: a vagina. Things came to a head when, in my second year of college, I fell totally in love with a blond curly-haired Quaker boy. Studying together one night, he pointed to an entry about male-to-female transsexualism in his Abnormal Psych (!! it was 1995!!) textbook and said with a seductive smile, “Have you ever thought about this? I think I could love you if you were....”

Needless to say, I didn’t take him up on his suggestion. But he did fuck with my head for a while, and through the tears and blood I finally decided that cutting through my own flesh was not the answer to becoming this thing that was inside me. Instead, it’s better to have the cut accompanied by ink and image, as permanent as any God-given reproductive organ.