Language, Storytelling and Poetry

We ask our clients about their gender. It is a surprisingly complicated question to ask. Some people wonder why we need to know, while others assume we are asking about preferred pronouns or making some kind of political statement. But the reason is much more practical: we work in Hebrew.

In Hebrew, it is almost impossible to speak without referring to gender. Verbs, adjectives and pronouns are gendered. Even a simple word like "you," which remains neutral in English, requires a choice. When we are creating a piece of Hebrew calligraphy for a specific person, that choice matters. But there is also something interesting in the fact that Hebrew forces us to make it at all.

If a language requires us to distinguish between masculine and feminine again and again, we inevitably become aware of that distinction. Something grammatical becomes something we notice. The more I think about this, the less it seems to be specifically about gender and the more it raises a much bigger question about language itself: how much does the language we speak shape what we notice?

Language gives names to things and creates categories and relationships between them. Some distinctions are important in one language and almost absent in another. Some thoughts can be expressed beautifully in one language and become strangely clumsy when translated. Anyone who speaks several languages probably knows the feeling of not being quite the same person in each of them.

For me, Russian is the language of home. I spoke it with my family, but rarely with strangers, and because of this it became something private and emotionally charged. Speaking Russian outside of that context used to make me feel exposed, almost like a child again. That reaction has very little to do with vocabulary. It comes from where the language lives in my biography.

Other languages occupy other places. Some give me more structure, while others give me access to a different emotional vocabulary or a different kind of intimacy. Changing languages can change the way a thought develops before it is even spoken. Of course, some of this is personal. We encounter languages at particular moments in our lives and attach memories, people and places to them, but I don't think that explains everything.

A language also has its own history. We enter something that existed long before us, something shaped by generations of people using the same words and grammatical structures. Their ways of seeing the world have left traces in the language, just as the language itself has influenced the ways they expressed their experience. This is part of what makes translation such a strange art.

There is rarely a perfect equivalent. You can translate the dictionary meaning of a word and still lose the thing that made the word important in the first place. A cultural association might disappear, the rhythm may change, and a metaphor that feels completely natural in one language can become strange or awkward in another.

This gap between languages is something we encounter constantly in our work. Many of the people who come to us know some Hebrew but are not native speakers. They may already have a word or phrase in mind, and sometimes they have even found a translation that is technically correct. But technical correctness isn't enough when these words are going to become a tattoo. We have to understand what the person was trying to say before the translation happened, and this is where storytelling enters the process.

Someone might begin by telling us about a person, an experience, a loss, a change in their life, or something they want to remember. We listen to the story, but we are not necessarily looking for a sentence that summarizes it. We are trying to understand what inside that story actually matters.

Sometimes the most accurate way to express an experience is not to describe it literally. A metaphor can get closer to something than a biographical account. A poem can say more about grief, love or belonging than a precise description of what happened. So we often begin with the autobiographical and gradually move toward something more symbolic.

This movement is important because a tattoo has to survive the story that produced it. The circumstances of our lives change, and our relationship to what happened changes with them. A sentence that describes one particular moment very precisely may eventually become trapped inside that moment, while a metaphor has more room to move. Storytelling helps us find that space, and it also brings us back to the particular strangeness of Hebrew.

Hebrew is largely structured around roots. Many Hebrew words are formed through combinations of roots and patterns, with roots commonly consisting of three consonants. This creates relationships between words that may not be immediately visible in translation. A word does not necessarily stand alone; it can carry echoes of other words formed from the same root.

The letters themselves have another history. In Jewish mystical traditions, Hebrew letters have been understood as more than signs used to record speech. Over centuries, they have acquired symbolic and spiritual interpretations, including interpretations of their shapes, numerical values and relationships to one another.

This creates an unusual situation for calligraphy. We are working with the meaning of a phrase, but also with the physical letters that form it. Sometimes those two levels speak to one another. A connection appears between words through a shared root, or a particular letter becomes important. The written form begins to participate in the meaning rather than simply representing it.

There is an ancient idea behind this relationship between words and creation. In Genesis, the world comes into being through a series of divine acts of speech, beginning with "Let there be light." I find this idea powerful even outside of its religious meaning. Naming something can change our relationship to it. An experience that has remained vague can become clearer when we finally find a word for it, and something private changes when it is spoken aloud. Language can give a boundary to things that previously had none.

At the same time, language can also become restrictive. Once we have a word for something, it is tempting to believe the word contains the whole thing. This is perhaps part of the reason poetry is so important. Poetry does something slightly strange to language: it takes the structures we normally use automatically and interferes with them. Grammar can bend, a sentence can remain unfinished, a word can be chosen for its sound as much as for its definition, and silence can become part of the sentence. Language stops behaving so efficiently, and in that interruption something else can appear.

This matters to us because the stories people bring are often difficult to reduce to a statement. They contain contradictions. Someone may want to remember and let go at the same time. A word may need to contain grief and gratitude, belonging and distance, something that ended and something that continues. Literal language sometimes struggles with this. Poetry doesn't necessarily solve the contradiction; it can simply allow it to remain.

Perhaps that is what we are ultimately searching for when we work with someone on a Hebrew tattoo: not the perfect translation of the sentence they arrived with, and not a clever way of summarizing their biography, but a form of language that can stay with them.

A tattoo has a peculiar relationship with time. It usually begins in the past because something happened, someone mattered, or something changed. But the tattoo itself moves in the opposite direction. It travels with the person into a future that neither they nor we can know, which means that the words have to be able to travel too.

This is why the process begins with language but very quickly becomes a process of storytelling. We move between languages, memories, metaphors and associations until we arrive at something that feels distilled without becoming empty. Sometimes it is a sentence, sometimes a fragment, and sometimes one word is enough.

In the end, when someone asks us to find the right Hebrew words for a tattoo, they are not really asking us only for a translation. They are looking for a talisman that can hold their story.