Ink and Trauma

There is something immediately understood when a person tattoos over a scar. The logic is visible and almost needs no explanation: here is where something terrible happened, and here is what I have chosen to place there instead. Pain that was imposed has become something beautiful that was chosen. The scar remains, but the person has decided what will exist alongside it.

But this happens also in less obvious ways.

Trauma does not only stay in memory. This is perhaps one of the hardest things to understand about it, because we tend to think of difficult experiences as things that happened in the past, events stored somewhere in the mind, accessible through thought and conversation. But when it comes to trauma, the body also plays an important role. We cannot separate what happens to our soul from what happens to our body.

When an experience is too overwhelming to process in the moment, it may not become a coherent memory in the way other experiences do. Its effects can continue to appear physiologically: in the nervous system, in patterns of tension and breathing, or in the way the body braces, goes still, or floods with sensation in circumstances that recall the original experience. Trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk has spent decades examining this relationship between traumatic experience and the body. The body, he argues, "keeps the score"; what happened in the past can continue to be experienced in the present through bodily and emotional responses (van der Kolk, 2014).

Psychological trauma can therefore leave marks that are no less consequential for being invisible. It can appear in a body that tenses in certain situations, in emotions that arrive unexpectedly, or in a sense of helplessness that persists long after the danger has passed (Meyburgh, 2006). This relationship between traumatic experience and the body may also help us understand why some people are drawn to something physical when trying to make sense of what happened to them.

Tattooing offers one particularly interesting way of thinking about this.

Across cultures and throughout history, tattooing has been much more than a decorative practice. Anthropologist Lars Krutak, who has spent decades studying tattooing among Indigenous peoples, documents body marking as connected to identity, social belonging, rites of passage, spirituality, and significant events in a person's life (Krutak, 2014). In many of these traditions, the tattoo was not simply an image worn on the body. The process of receiving it was significant as well.

Among Indigenous communities of the Arctic and Northwest Coast, tattooing has also been connected to physical and spiritual practices of healing. Tlingit tattoo artist Nahaan has spoken about tattooing as an experience that can alter a person's state and create an opening for what has been carried internally to emerge. The physical experience of tattooing can become part of the process rather than simply the means of producing the final image.

I recognize something of this in the people who come to me for tattoos connected to difficult experiences. Very often, they already know what they want to mark. There is a particular loss, event, relationship, or period in their life that they have been carrying with them. The question is not necessarily whether it should be remembered. It already is. The question becomes what form it should take.

This is where the process itself begins to matter. A person has to decide on an image or a word, where it will be placed, when they are ready to do it, and who they trust to put it there. Researchers studying tattooing as a coping practice have described this process as a form of storytelling and meaning-making, through which people can return symbolically to an experience and decide how it will be represented.

This question of choice is particularly important in relation to trauma. A traumatic experience can involve profound helplessness: something happens to a person without their being able to prevent or control it. Tattooing is different in one very simple respect. The person chooses it. They choose the image, the place, the moment, and they consent to what happens to their body.

Perhaps this is also part of the need to make the experience tangible.

A psychological wound cannot be pointed to in the same way that a scar can. Grief cannot be touched. A traumatic memory has no visible location on the body, even when its effects are felt there. A tattoo changes this. Something that has existed as memory, sensation, or grief is given a physical form and a specific place on the body.

This does not mean that the tattoo contains the trauma, or that making something visible resolves it. But there is a difference between carrying something that has no form and deciding how that experience will be represented. Research on therapeutic aspects of tattoo acquisition has similarly connected tattooing with processes of meaning-making, identity, and the transformation of experiences through their inscription on the body.

A tattoo does not resolve trauma, and it does not replace whatever deeper work healing may require. I also do not think everyone who tattoos a difficult experience is necessarily trying to "heal" it. Sometimes the need may simply be to acknowledge that something happened, to remember someone, to mark survival, or to refuse to let an experience remain invisible.

The body remembers what has happened to it. Tattooing cannot rewrite that history. What it can do is allow a person to consciously add something to the body that carries it.

There is something important to me in that distinction. The difficult experience was not chosen. The mark is.

References

Krutak, L. (2014). Tattoo Traditions of Native North America: Ancient and Contemporary Expressions of Identity. University of Washington Press.

Martines, C. R. (2021). The Transformative Tattoo: What Can Healing from Trauma Look Like? Doctoral dissertation, California Institute of Integral Studies.

Meyburgh, C. (2006). The Body Remembers: The Psychophysiology of Trauma and Trauma Treatment. Unpublished manuscript.

Painter, K. (2017). Therapeutic Aspects of Tattoo Acquisition: A Phenomenological Study. Master's thesis.

van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking.