- Inspired by Maude Stevens Wagner, the first recognised female tattooist.
I tattoo feminine wishes in darkest hues of black ink, painting unlikely visions across my own canvas-bared skin. I weave prime colours into my skin, forming an image of me riding a lion, bare-back and free. When at artistry, my thoughts are unfettered, unleashing tangled passions in each scribbling of ink, forming an idealised self.
Needlepoints remind me of who I am, inserting script above my veins as a form of speaking in tongues. My arms drip in extended wingspans. Biblical butterflies, fanged serpents and dragons perform my version of a religious dance. Penned creatures that soar or race high above the grave demands of common life; they are all that I crave to be.
Celestial libertines. Creatures of freedom.
I am feral as a scavenger ripping morsels of fleshy meat from quivering bones, unspooling pleasure as I stitch visual meanings. I ink waves of spontaneous creation; a wordless wordsmith, encased within childlike pictures of imagination.
I paint my future in hope that it is realised. Yet fame, in its thwarted oddity, finds me nonetheless – for skewered reasons. I’m shackled with the title of ‘The First Tattooist’, so, by default, Americans begin to learn my name: Maude Stevens Wagner. I’m paraded as a freak of nature in travelling circus shows, but what is mournfully concealed is my artistry. I wield the tattooing needle between my chiselled, honed fingers.
Each circus audience hungers, yearning to gawp upon inked flesh, marvelling at my body’s covering of tattooed animals and birds. I’m a walking visualised zoo to the masses – nothing more or less. I’m no artist in their hungry eyes, harbouring worthy, evidenced talent; they yearn only for my displacement in society as an inked raven, splattering globules of blood-spilled ink to the awaiting crowd in each snapshot of my “other” flesh.
Dexterity of the held needlepoint: the calm, steady grasp of the scalpel and exacting pin-pointed blade, escapes them. For imprisoned within clownish tents of garish red and white, I am silenced. I may as well have stitched my lips permanently: sealing them closed with tattooing, binding ink, forgetting chunks of my identity.
On display, I’m on par with any trapeze artist, juggler or fire eater – mere mute, physical fodder to gawp mindlessly upon. Here, my artistry stutters, choking on itself in self-effacing corners. My needle stutters when I am spectacle only, unable to secure a fleshy, secure grounding, coursing narrative pathways, before signing off using an onyx, stylistic signature. Here, under a dome of claustrophobic canvas, I bear no significance as a creator. I’m only a physically obtuse presence. An oddity of nature to make elongated O-shaped mouths at, bluntly insulting.
So, I bend. I mould myself to an unwanted applause when summoned; the ringmaster beady-eyeing me with laced disdain; unsure of the potency of the fire that flares beneath my besmeared surface. Sometimes, I fix my mouth into a snarl, hoping that my chained venom of creativity stuns him into submission. Perhaps he frets that I will burn his circus to the ground, rebirthing in charcoal ashes. A hopeful threat.
Yet, every night thus far, I cower in macabre moonlight, reminding myself of who I am not: a puppet on his strings. Venom, channelled and unstoppered as gin in the hands of the afflicted, flicks a switch on in my veins, blood boiling savagely with inaction. Tonight, my nightmares lock me tight, more clasping than a gaol cell, where I envision a feathery future of newly inked release papers.
They flutter in the breeze, with only a whisper of a signature, for I am bound here as Icarus to the sun, flying all too painfully close to the glare of its punishing rays.
Emma Wells
Emma is a mother and English teacher. She has poetry and prose published with various literary journals and magazines. She is currently writing her fifth novel.
Emma won Wingless Dreamer’s Bird Poetry Contest of 2022 and her short story, ‘Virginia Creeper’, was selected as a winning title by WriteFluence Singles Contest in 2021.
Recently, Emma won Dipity Literary Magazine’s 2024 Best of the Net Nominations for Fiction with a short story entitled ‘The Voice of a Wildling’.
Her poem ‘Rose-Tainted is the winner of the poetry category, Discourse Literary Journal, February 2024 Issue.
She has just been shortlisted for her flash fiction writing, ‘Agnes Richter’, by Anthology.
Image by Sarah McIntyre