Meaning of My Sleeve
/My right arm is festooned with ink displaying a particular scene from Dante Alighieri’s - The Inferno. The upper arm, which I’ll explain in this post, started as a coverup.
When I was twenty-four, I read everything I could on suicide because I wanted to understand what I was fighting. I stumbled across Edwin Shneidman, the father of modern suicidology, and read his books:
My psychiatrist was a bit surprised to learn of my reading habits, as Shneidman is generally reserved for those in graduate school psychiatry, but I was determined to increase my understanding of suicide. So much so that I created a logo for what was going to be my own book about my personal journey with suicide — “Suicidy”.
I took what was known as Helvetica Man, and, with my woefully untalented Photoshop skills, managed to create a version where the man was pointing at his own head. In my mind, it was a clear depiction of someone trying to shoot themself, but with poor aim. I was so thrilled by my rendering, I went to get this tattooed on my right tricep. Looking back, the tattooer was definitely less than impressed by the design, but I was adamant, so he permanently tattooed my Suicidy logo to my arm.
In my mid-twenties, I coached hundreds of youth lacrosse players. What I did not expect was that each and every one of them, when seeing my tattoo, asked: “Why do you have the guy from the bathroom sign on your arm?” I had not realized that anyone seeing my tattoo would immediately think of the characters that displayed “Men” and “Women” on restroom doors everywhere.
Thus began my search for a workable coverup.
Years later, I settled on the scene from Dante’s Inferno known as: “The Wood of the Suicides”. I found the wood engravings of Gustave Dore, and thought they would be a perfect style of dark artwork that a skilled tattooer could work with. Coverups need to be larger and darker than an original tattoo, and, sadly, mine was large and completely black. This is why there is a significant negative space on the back of my tricep now as that is the part of the tattoo that is the actual coverup. The rest of the design is meant to pull the viewer’s eye away from the blackness and toward the scene, which is full of souls trapped in the bark of trees.
In “The Inferno,” Dante condemned suicides, also known as “self-murderers”, to an eternity without a body because they had already discarded what was given to them by God. Dante so abhorred the self-murders, that even after judgment day, the bodies of the suicides would be hung from their own branches. Needless to say, Dante did not see much good in those that had ended their own lives.
Why, then, do I have this terrifying depiction permanently tattooed onto my body for all to see? For that very public reason.
Tattoos gave me the opportunity to make an invisible fight visible. My easily hidden experiences with suicide are out there for the world to see, and, far from condemning me, liberate me from what used to be personal torment.
That’s the story about my upper-arm. I’ll explore the scenes and quotes on my forearm next week. For a quick taste of Dante’s punishments, I included an excerpt from “The Inferno” about the seventh circle of hell below.
The Poet began again: “That this man may
with all his heart do for you what your words
entreat him to, imprisoned spirit, I pray,
tell us how the soul is bound and bent
into these knots, and whether any ever
frees itself from such imprisonment.”
At that the trunk blew powerfully, and then
the wind became a voice that spoke these words:
”Briefly is the answer given: when
out of the flesh from which it tore itself,
the violent spirit comes to punishment,
Minos assigns it to the seventh shelf.
It falls into the wood, and landing there,
wherever fortune flings it, it strikes root,
and there it sprouts, lusty as any tare,
Shoots up a sapling, and becomes a tree.
The Harpies, feeding on its leaves then, give it
pain and pain’s outlet simultaneously.
Like the rest, we shall go for our husks on Judgment Day,
but not that we may wear them, for it is not just
that a man be given what he throws away.
Here shall we drag them and in this mournful glade
our bodies will dangle to the end of time,
each on the thorns of its tormented shade.”
