Tattoo Removal: Three Snapshots

SUSAN A. PHILLIPS

These snapshot essays are based on fieldwork conducted at an East L.A. tattoo removal clinic serving a populationof former prisoners, ex-gang members, and recovering drug addicts. The snapshots explore gendered lifewayssurrounding these categories and are based on ethnographic accounts of women who seek bodily and socialtransformation.

Dolores

A tiny girl, she begins.Her mother sits withher on the floor for

hours, cooing and singing.When the father leaves, hermother can no longer standthe sitting.

Now seven, the girl playsby herself. Her mother fadesfor long stretches, a needle stuck in her arm, sucking outblood, pushing in poison. One night, her mother leavesher with people who do things to her, down there. Thencomes thin, silver metal, wrapped in thread, dipped inink. Arms hold her down, force her body still. Handssuffocate her mouth. A heart appears on her arm ever-lasting, birthed by cruel laughter and heavy breath.

She becomes an animal.She tries to hide the animal. With long sleeves, for

example. “I’m never hot, oh no, no, never,” she says toa teacher. But she feels the animal inside, lurking undera heart-shaped lid.

At twelve she nurses an anger. She finds familywith other girls, on the street, with boys who write onwalls. Night falls, and she has Manny put a spiderwebon her elbow, a masculine spot, just the meanesttattoo she knows. Protection floods her body, warmsher skin.

Soon her own children come. Now, a needle sweet-ens her blood. A glass pipe burns her lips. She hearschildren crying. She looks at her arm and sees a heart-shaped alien there. Whose shape is she?

She enters a clinic, gleaming white: a room witha machine that has an arm of its own. It spits out a

thin red stream, burning the heart, bleeding it andcrusting it over. Slowly the heart fades. The spiderwebdries up. A few years earlier, she stopped being ananimal. Now she talks a lot, in groups, and with herchildren. The heart and all its bitter juices won’t comeback.

Reyna

Her father wants her to takeshots. He owns a bar. Heshows her off: “Look how mydaughter can drink!” Six yearsold, she downs a few. Hardstuff, whiskey, tequila. Shelikes it a little, she thinks.

She rides in his car, thecops tailing them. He makes ahard left. “Run! Run!” he calls, opening her door into analley. She spills onto rough asphalt, holding his specialspoon in her lips as she goes. Sucking sleek metal, bentfor burning, running just as fast as she can.

Now in the garage, her father’s friends buzz theirhome guns, carving words onto naked flesh. She asksfor her own word. “You want what?” they ask her. Herfather frowns. She frowns too. She raids her mother’ssewing basket, then pierces and pricks, making the firstones, the special ones, the letters and dots.

Older, she bears a child: a little girl, stillborn. Later,sons come, three of them. But she always remembers thatperfect baby, so pure and clean, the one God said no to.

She enters a clinic, gleaming white. She goes for thesmall ones first, the special ones, the ones on her hands,fingers, wrists. They fade. She spends her time now withgirls that run away. She talks them out of running

Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 27, Issue 2, pp. 117–118, ISSN 1058-7187, online ISSN 1548-7458. © 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-7458.2011.01095.x.

further. When she was a girl, see, she used to take shots,hard shots, shots that burned her all the way down.

Felicia

The one that gave her theblack eye did it. In the creaseof her leg, near her privateparts, that’s where it is. Heshoves her into the back seat.Driving, ranting. He will killher, she’s sure. She knowsshe’s dead. Her face is wet. Shecan’t see, but she knows it’sblood. When she wakes up, she escapes. She takes herchild. But she also takes his name: permanent, fixed inthat crease.

The shelter hides like her tattoo. She can’t showernow without seeing him. Every time she washes, sheremembers. Sometimes she smiles as she first wakes, oras she sees her daughter playing. But then he reappears,reminding her in blue-black. She remembers how he didit: her abuser, she now says. One night, he says he lovesher and puts a home gun to her skin. She bleeds. Hisname claims her sex like territory.

She enters a clinic, gleaming white. Blue chairs inthe waiting room and a cross—not the blessed Virgin,but the Son will do. The name itches like it wants tocome off on its own. She flinches from the male doctor’stouch. She bleeds again: same place, different reason.The name peels off like a Band-Aid from her daughter’sknee, pulling, hurting, healing.

Susan A. Phillips teaches at Pitzer College in Claremont. She is the author of Wallbangin: Graffiti and Gangs in L.A. (Chicago,1999) and has studied gangs and their expressive culture since 1990. Her forthcoming book, Operation Fly Trap: Gangs, Drugs,and the Law, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in Spring 2012. Phillips serves on the board of SunriseCommunity Outreach, which provides tattoo removal and mentoring services to people in transition.

118 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 27 Number 2 Fall 2011