Saturday, May 16, 2015

Tattoos: Rumi, Mastectomy and the Army



Spring storms over the Arizona high desert kept me inside for a couple of days. So I picked up a translation compendium of Rumi’s writings and sat by the window to listen to the rain.

I thought I had read most of his writings translated in English. Yet I was surprised to find a poem about a man who decides to get a tattoo of a lion’s face but after seeing the needle and learning about the pain, backs off.  The barber who was going to tattoo the lion’s face says to the squeamish man:

“O brother, endure the pain of the lancet, that you may escape from the poison of your miscreant self,
For sky and sun and moon bow to the people who have escaped from self existence.”

While the poem is typical Rumi concerning transcendence and self effacement, it made me wonder if tattoos were common in his days. So, while surrounded by the aroma of the wet sand, juniper and mesquite trees, I explored the topic.

I learned that tattoos and body piercing were common in Persia thousands of years before Rumi’s time. Specifically statues dating back to the Achaemenid Empire show tattoos and earrings on kings and soldiers.

Things may be returning full circle as in 2015 the US Army changed its regulations about solders and tattoos and now, under the Army’s new tattoo policy, soldiers will be able to have ink on their arms and legs as long as it isn’t visible in the Army Service Uniform.

I knew about soldiers or at least the Japanese Samurai who, as outcasts, tattooed their bodies both as identity and for the scare-factor. I have seen facial tattoos in descendents of the Atayal tribe in Taiwan. In ancient China criminals were tattooed on the face; in ancient Egypt tattoos may have had medicinal purposes, as anthropologists have suggested that many female mummies had tattoos on their pelvic area perhaps as a cure for pelvic peritonitis.

This got my attention and I searched more about the role of tattoos in folk medicine. Surprisingly it was not folk medicine but survivors of cancer after western medical treatment and surgery who have adopted tattooing as a new way of self expression. Especially mastectomy patients who have found tattooing as a way to turn their disfiguring scars into a form of art and self-expression.

How wonderful!

Actually there is a website called P.Ink that connects tattoo artists with mastectomy patient. One artist is quoted there saying:

“What was clinical became beautiful again… We turned sterile into sensual. We took back control.”

And that made me think about Rumi’s statement about self-existence. If Rumi knew that tattooing could restore self esteem, confidence, femininity and sensuality, would he still question the pursuit of self-existence?

… I looked in my “Ali Baba’s Photo Cave”… I had taken pictures of men with elaborate tattoos.






Placing them within the context of when and where I took these pictures, I wondered -- was it art? Search for identity? Self existence? Or perhaps simply therapeutic?

I may never know.

May 16, 2015

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2015





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