I don’t have a tattoo because I don’t want one, I tell everyone. That’s a lie. I have wanted a tattoo since I first saw a person up close with a tattoo of their choice instead of “Amarendu’s wife” scribbled in Hindi on the right arm of Kanti’s mother, packing her nameless being into a husband-shaped box, locking it up, and tossing away the key. A tattoo of belonging, but not to herself, never to herself. I had not wanted a tattoo because I never found out what Kanti’s mother’s name was.

But I flew the nest and landed in college to find a kind friend who decorated her body with art, she said. When I asked what the thorny bush on her ankle meant, she told me it was a reminder of a phase where she lay flatlined in a torture chamber and realised the hard way that seemingly lush bushes have thorns more often than not. I gazed at her and then at my bare skin with no art to dedicate to it, and she smiled and said, “a tattoo can mean what you want it to mean.”

I don’t have a tattoo because I quit a well-paying prestige job right around my earliest panic attacks after I overheard a boss admonish a red-eyed employee, who shook off her shaking and entered the meeting room after drawing a sharp breath. I never learned to shake off my shaking, so I fainted instead and sat wordlessly in the doctor’s office less than a week into my new job.

I don’t have a tattoo because my parents didn’t quite understand why I quit a job just because I fainted once, yet booked me tickets home anyway. They took me along on their pre-planned trip to Dalhousie and did not get me a separate room. My father said “why would you even think that” and left when I suggested I could book myself another room to give them their space, an insult I now know to be of the highest order. My mother and I slept on the cozy double bed while he pulled out the extra mattress and plonked himself on it way before his bedtime, way before I could begin to timidly assert any protest. On a walk to the market the next morning, we passed by a group of foreigners, the tallest among them flaunting a tattoo sleeve while also flaunting some weak-looking yoga moves. My father shook his head and smiled at me wryly, and I knew he hated tattoos as much as he hated weak-looking yoga moves.

My god-fearing mother came around to accepting and then defending my interfaith relationship despite her brother demanding an explanation for why her blood does not boil. Her only query, over an unscheduled cup of ginger chai on an unexpectedly bitter winter morning, was whether the guy I chose is a smoker. I don’t have a tattoo because I said an emphatic “no, not at all” while digging my nails into my palms under the table.

My tattoo would have been on my left arm, and I would have asked the tattoo artist to choose the spot that hurt the least. “There is no pain; you are receding” it would have said, because a tattoo can mean what I want it to mean. I would have made sure to use a semicolon instead of a comma because I once deducted two marks from a junior copyeditor’s review for allowing the grave error of a comma splice to pass. Wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt my friend got for me from a street market in Chicago, I would have played the song while getting its lyrics etched onto my body. In the moments culminating into decorating my body with art, I would have slipped into a dreamless void and meandered into the recesses of my buried desires to greet them with a knowing, lingering affection.

I don’t have a tattoo because I see my parents getting older than when I last saw them, I notice them take longer to pluck coriander stems, and I leave home anyway. We pretend our eyes are not glassy and there are no globe-sized lumps in our throats as I wave at them after getting my boarding pass verified at the airport gate. I see them waving back a tireless goodbye until they think I am not visible anymore, and I duck behind the side windows as I catch them look at each other for a second longer than usual before stepping inside the car. Tattoos hurt, don’t they?

Stuti Srivastava is a writer who looks to the earth before calling herself one. She likes to explore themes related to gender and relationship dynamics, inner worlds, and inequalities. When not binge-watching grisly crime thrillers, she will be found curled up with a book, lost in her world. Her writing has been published in MeanPepperVine and Unruly Dialogues.