Bea had always wanted to get a tattoo but she “always wanted it to have some meaning.” Bea got her first tattoo around 1997 and has a total of three, all of which symbolize or commemorate milestones in her life. She was a single parent who had escaped an abusive relationship and is now working at the university she completed her studies at. Bea states “My tattoos were invisible. So they were in places that you couldn’t see” with her first one being on her hip and second on her shoulder. With time, however, Bea came to feel the need to outwardly express herself and place a tattoo in a more visible spot on her forearm. “I’ve chosen to get these tattoos, but also the deliberate way that I choose to live my life, and really sink deep into confronting uncomfortable stuff.” Bea tells people all about her tattoos because she is proud of them, as they are meaningful and represent everything she has gone through and where she has landed. Bea states that they are “visible representations of the struggles, the resilience and that milestones that I have met. So I specifically got the tattoos when it was sort of the reckoning of my understanding of myself and where I was going.”
Waterfall with flowers and butterflies around it
Bea’s first tattoo is on her hip. As a survivor of intimate partner violence, getting accepted into the social service program and feeling like she“was finally getting my shit together” made her want to commemorate the changes and growth with a tattoo. While she wouldn’t describe herself as an astronomy buff, she is a Pisces and feels that it speaks to her personality, who she is, and how she sees the world. Due to this, she wanted to incorporate water into this first tattoo. She also wanted butterflies to symbolize new life. Bea did a lot of research into the symbolism and attributes of colours. She picked the colours indigo, blue, red and green. “Indigo blue symbolizes inner peace, spirituality, and psychic awareness. The green one symbolizes higher learning and success. And the red one symbolizes motherhood, love and sexuality.” For Bea, the tattoo was a “rite of passage” as she moved forward with her life. These symbols helped make her “resilient, but also helped me move forward.”
Tiny peace sign with a daisy through it, covered with indigenous flowers of her heritage.
The second tattoo Bea got was another commemorative tattoo. She got a tiny peace sign with a daisy through it because for her, daisies represented “renewal, simplicity, resilience.” However, this tattoo lost its colour, and because it was very small, it looked like a smudge over time. Moving forward to 2022, Bea was again looking at symbolism and the discussions she had at school surrounding personal reflections about her privilege as a settler, but also how her ethnicity formed who she is and she wanted to pay homage to that. She covered up that original piece with the indigenous plants or flowers of her ethnicity. She has a laurel that symbolizes Greece, a corn flower, which is German, and a tulip which is indigenous to Hungary. Bea thought “paying homage to my heritage is also recognizing my privilege and how I move forward in this space with who I am.”
Peace Sign
Peace is very important to Bea, though she distinguishes between “the sort of that peace and love [where] everyone gets a free pass [and the kind that is] more about peaceful coexistence”. This gave Bea a sense of pride that she has come full circle in her life from being a single mom who escaped domestic violence, to going to university and now coming back to the same environment where she finished her studies. The peace sign symbolizes an “outward acknowledgment of my commitment to just being a good person, but also that I had come full circle.” This tattoo is a peace sign in negative space with various hues of blue, orange, red, and green. There is also an imperfection in this tattoo, however, as Bea states “that was by design […] because when I think about peace, I think I cannot say peace overall, because there are some behaviours that I can hate. So, I thought this tattoo represents that there is a line that’s broken, and there is a time to stand up against hate.”
STORIES FROM THE SKIN 