Soul-Fully Scripting Flesh: Poetic Justice & Joy by Margot Van Sluytman

Ours is a city of abundant tattoo shops. Places, I was to learn, where art and heart are rife. Places in which rich conversations occur. Conversations that linger long after the ink has begun to settle.

Wending my way to find the place to begin the process of scripting my skin, I spoke with a young man. His back was bent as he focussed on his animal friend and for a short while, before approaching him with my questions, I read the ink that covered his arms and legs. So many designs, descriptors, expressive strokes of thought and meaning known only to him. Hieroglyphs wherein his voice, his many selves, were revealed, yet hidden unless conversation were struck and desire to speak forthcoming. Wherefrom grew his choices?

I decided to cross the street and to ask him the meaning of some of his tattoos, the ones that spoke most vocally to me. As I moved closer, I spotted the script on his wrist. Script among an array of the colours and images. That script struck me. A fragment from The Tempest. Caliban’s words.

Be not afeard; the isle is full of
noises,
Sounds and sweet airs that give
delight and hurt not.  

As a lover the bard’s final play, I was awe-struck. Awe-struck by the resonance I felt between how tattoos have been and can be (mis)understood and (mis)represented and Caliban’s words, “…that give delight and hurt not.”

His response when I asked if he might tell me what I should ask before being tattooed, was, indeed of delight and pride, a sense of connection. Assumptions of who and how we should “be” based on number of years on the earth, clothing, accent, gender, were absent.

When I asked him about his choice of Caliban’s words, his response was as beautiful as the fact that he took the time ask what it was I was seeking for what would be my first tattoo. He spoke of Caliban as an outcast, a foreigner, beholden to his master, in love with beauty and hope, though because of how he looked he was feared and thought of as nought.

In learning of this young man’s journeys with this piece of art speaking on his flesh, I was as if transported. Cast upon a sea, a ship-wreck reaching strange shores. And I felt a home. In a moment of time as the sun beat down on us standing on the sidewalk two strangers decades apart in age, different tonality to our voices, I was in a new land. One that wished to welcome me.

After I had told him it was words I wanted to have done. He noted, “Writing takes skill. Ask to see their work.”

I learned much about this silent art that speaks our body. I was educated on what to ask, what to look for, and inspired to trust my instincts. His openness, encouragement, and passion moved me profoundly. After I thanked him and shook the paw with his four-legged friend, I was on my way to story my skin.

What is it about this ancient practice? This practice of transcribing story upon our body. Inspiring conversation with a stranger on a sidewalk. Communing with joy. Communing about knowledge-keeping and voice. I began to think of how his tattoos invited a harking back to ancient caves and behemoth boulders, such vast and varied scripting on those places. Feeling kinship. A mingling of bone and blood. A re-new-al. A recognition of what it is to write, to paint, to engrave narrative and story in a manner that highlights agency, voice, and visioning. To become: Sangoma. Canatadora. Bard.

To sculpt narrative on the body is a call and answer over millennia to set our personal story in figurative stone and in so doing to be heard, to listen, to hear, to speak. To witness. To be witnessed. To be with-ness-ed. In and for and by and with and because of community. Personal inking on the flesh is “speaking” what might seem the unspeakable. The unutterable. The long-buried secret. The thing we might be embarrassed to say. To sing out from roof-tops: “I was there.” “I am here.” This is me.” “We are.” “I love.” I have been loved.” I am love.” And so much more beyond.

Leaving the wonderful Tattoo Parlour where I had among other kindred pieces “voiced” upon my skin, “Poetic Justice” accompanied me. My fleshy awakening was for me birthing meaning which had been gestating in my soul for decades. And joy was mine.

Inking our bodies, I learned that day, is inking our very soul. Dreaming what is written in the body, the heart, the psyche, the ancient wisdom in our genes, directly upon to our body. Doing so because the map of our being, becoming, belonging, forms the shape of humanity’s shared-awareness that to reflect, to story, and to connect is who we are. How we mean. I am. We are.

Caliban Queries
“…am I all adders who
With cloven tongues do
Hiss me into madness…”
No, no, no sweet soul.
Thou art no madness.
Thou are scripted
Charm whose
Calamitous birth
Purports to pen
Thee into solitary
Longing, when
Love doth crave
Thine heART
And know thine
Brimming abundance.
©Margot Van Sluytman

Story Maps
In the gap wHERe meaning
Serves silence, story maps
Hope upon the finery of flesh.
Flesh signing, flesh singing
Flesh bearing with-ness,
As heART mimes and
Mirrors untethered philosophy
Whittling whimsy as
Whispering wisdom
Blooms. Tattooed as
Is the soul’s very
Knowing that to
Speak in myriad
Tongues, divines clarity
Anoints poetic justice.
Delivers decisive joy.
©Margot Van Sluytman

Shapes Evolving
Sweet possibility sprung
Upon my fleshy yearning.
Morning’s inner impulse
For quelling hunger pangs
Delighted upon glimpsing
New meaning-making
Methodology. Kindred
Phantoms placated empty
Howls by metamorphic
Shapes evolving.
And Prospero’s child
Miranda speaks tenderness
“Thou didst smile.”
©Margot Van Sluytman