Tattoos, Body, and Beauty.

This past weekend I got a beautiful white ink tattoo.  Anyone who knows me knows I love body modification-any form-and the more tasteful and elegant it looks, the more I'm into it.  While I've been preached to for the past four days that it's going to disappear, that it is going to yellow, and that it'll basically be invisible after the healing process, every time my eye catches the white calligraphy E adorned with a heart and a flower (I swear, it's so girly it'd shock most people) I feel a thrill like I couldn't believe.

All of my life, I've struggled with my body issues and self-esteem.  I have never felt beautiful.  Most days I struggle to feel presentable, no matter who tells me otherwise.  Body modifications give me power over my looks that diet and exercise do not.  Diet and exercise takes time.  Body modifications are immediate.  While they might require healing, they instantaneously take me from feeling like an ugly duckling into someone unique.   After all . . .my body, my decorations.

I have always heard the belief that to get a piercing or a tattoo is a way of defiling your body.  I don't see how that is possible.  Defiling it would be cutting your skin for perverse pleasure, ingesting drugs or alcohol for the purpose of harming yourself, and abusing your body with gluttony and sloth.  I was once involved in each of those examples and now that I'm not . . . I know that tattoos and piercings aren't the same thing.  They're a way of beautifying the body and soothing the soul that anyone without either wouldn't understand. 

There's a line about the body being a temple and to defile it is against God.  I can understand that this is a probable train of thought for most Christians.  After all, this life and the body we live it in are gifts from God.  However, feeling ugly and unworthy in that body is not what anyone should feel.  To wake up everyday, able to smile at what I see in the mirror because I can finally see beauty in it, is how God intended for me to love my body.  I just needed a little help getting to that point and anything that bolsters that confidence in anyone else isn't something that I could ever consider defilement.

My girly, elegant, beautiful white ink tattoo.  My 6th and counting.