I have two. They’re great coping mechanisms for me.
When I had a miscarriage, I wasn’t processing the pain. I just tried to push it deep down into some forgotten place. But like the old saying goes, feelings buried alive don’t ever die.
[insert zombie comment from Symbeline here]
I decided to get a circle tattoo’d in the palm of my left hand. I felt it was appropriate, since I had held my gestational sac in that hand.
A perfect circle.
Each year, on what would have been her birthday, I get another ring done (touching the line of the previous year). Eventually it will fill in.
It might sound morbid to linger on death and loss. But it’s not. It actually helped me deal with my grief. The constant reminder made it impossible to deny. I had to face and move through my sadness. There was no other way around it.
People sometimes ask me why I decided to get tattoos. For everyone, it’s different.
For me, I get tattoos so that my body remembers so my mind doesn’t have to hold all of it—it shares the burden of memory.