The name of my blog is Pen and Needle because of my love for writing, design and tattoos. In my About page I say,
“This blog is about tattoos and the stories behind them; it is about my experience designing tattoos and how I attempt to capture emotion in the drawing. I will also venture into my love for writing, sharing with you how different designs can help write intriguing stories about tragedy, joy, pain and love.”
Today, I want to share a story with you; it’s titled Hunted.
I’ve taken to keeping a tally. Starting from the ninth grade I believe we’ve hit 300. Things have only just begun and I have little reason to hope that they will ever slow down. My feet moved with every mark on the scoreboard and rounding out to 300, my laces are wearing thin, the heels of my shoes are collapsing and long have I passed the precipice of exhaustion. Past the caution signs, past “danger ahead,” past every screaming warning, I ran straight off the ledge of sanity, landing unbalanced in a tumbling array of false composure, and gathering my footing, took off running again. But with every jump, every senseless leap of faith, I pray he’ll be waiting with the strength to catch me at the bottom. I pray that he’ll stop running long enough for 300 to rest a while. But God has yet to answer me, so I tally and I run.
With no real purpose, without a clear motive and no idea what to do if I catch him, I’m running to chase and chasing just to show him that I still care; that no matter how fast or how far he runs, I will always be following, cleaning up whatever messes he leaves behind because that’s the only thing I know. It’s all I’ve got left. It’s all he’s got left. His body is thinning faster than my laces and his lungs are collapsing faster than the heels of my shoes. With bones protruding, his frail skin clings fearfully to a limp, intoxicated frame. I run after his steps, chasing and hunting a drug trail as he leaves behind the pieces of a shattered life.
One of my closest friends has received four tattoos. The story I wrote above is based on one of her tattoos.
We came up with the words for the tattoo together and it reads:
I’ll catch you in the end, I’ll love you through it all
Faith, hope and love, let Him be your withdrawal.
Her brother had a drug addiction and struggled for years with a conflict between his devout love for God and his believed need for heroin. She always tried to take on his problems as her own, believing that she could somehow “save him.” It wasn’t long before she understood that she could only love and pray for him and she would have to leave the rest up to God.
She knew she wanted a tattoo that described in some way his addiction and desired faith. She wanted a tattoo of words rather than an image and decided that her own words would be better than getting a literary tattoo, which is a tattoo based on books, poems, lyrics and several other literary sources. Ironically, my utilization of tattoos in order to write stories is opposite of the “literary tattoo” premise.
Whether the story comes first or the tattoo, the meaning, beauty and power in each is what truly matters.
Pen and Needle 