Finally, the Tattoo

O'Keefe Meets the Fisherman's Wife

It has been 16 months since my partial mastectomy. 16 months of waiting to heal and get a tattoo, which is my way of reclaiming the skin of what was once a very intimate part of my body. This part that has been drawn on, poked, skewered, imaged with the fish oil pastie, and cut. Like a cake someone tasted, and then awkwardly tried to hide the evidence that anything was missing.

I’m embarrassed to say that I thought when all the swelling went down, the remaining breast tissue would literally fall into place—as though the breast were a sack full of fat and ducts that would ease downward and fill out the center of my bra. I’ve learned that’s not how breast tissue works. I still have a breast with a central indentation, a large bite out of the center.

There’s been a slow-burn concern about lymphedema and the relationship between ink and cancer. Conflicting information and advice from doctors: wear compression sleeves as a prophylactic/don’t wear compression sleeves; sure, get the tattoo/don’t risk the tattoo.

As it isn’t enough that advice regarding alcohol is bizarrely inconsistent (no alcohol is best/eh, it is about quality of life), I’ve been second guessing my decision for months. 8 months, to be exact. My tattooist (his preferred title) has a waiting list of nearly a year. He works freehand, and did my entire back 8 years ago. I have never regretted my crane-corset, and I feel I can trust him with this oddly shaped body part.

There are women who choose to have a 3D nipple tattooed on their remaining or reconstructed breast, but I knew that I didn’t want that. I knew that it would just be a reminder that I was pretending I hadn’t lost something meaningful.

Reconstructing an actual nipple is rarely an option after radiation—and even when it is, it’s expensive, and harvesting the sensitive skin would require damaging another part of my body (the inner thigh, or the inner labia). And when it comes to waiting lists, and priority surgeries, there may also be a question of agism, when I consider the fact that women under 30 receive four times as much money for wigs than women over 30.

In some strange way, it seemed like these aspects of my decision not to pursue reconstruction had been contemplated and settled long before I had to face the real situation.

To say I am fine with this decision is not, of course, the same thing as saying I am fine with losing my nipple and part of my breast. Though, most of the time I don’t think about it.

Before I continue, I want to make it clear that I know that my body is still my own. Decisions I make about my body—in the end—are mine alone. Those days when chemotherapy was particularly difficult, I reminded myself that, I didn’t choose cancer, but I did choose to fight it. I didn’t even give up my physical autonomy to doctors.

I’ve discussed sex carefully here before. And I have only done so after talking to my husband, because his feelings and our sex life don’t belong to me, or to me alone, respectively.

Again the statistics of divorce among breast cancer patients/survivors is in the back of my mind. Not because I’m concerned that my marriage was in trouble, but as a reminder that if I let my dropping self-esteem become a problem, it would affect my relationship with my husband.

I’m not responsible for my cancer, or even the related emotions I feel, but I am responsible for how I handle them. That includes the matter of how I deal with my body. I had a breast reduction when I was 19. I won’t get into that, except to say that it was healing in terms of the childhood sexual abuse I’d experienced. I’d reclaimed my body then: my breasts symbolized overcoming trauma, so there was an extra layer of (potential) symbolism I had to deal with (am perhaps still dealing with) when cancer mutilated one of them.

Now what?

I asked my husband what he thought about the 3D nipple tattoos. About how the visual effect was very convincing, but any touch would reveal the illusion. I told him what I was considering doing instead: something beautiful and innocent from a distance, in passing (think the showers at the public pool), but erotic in the details. He didn’t weigh in at first, and said, “it is your body”.

“But it’s our sex life.”

I wasn’t asking permission. And to be honest, if he’d said, “I prefer the 3D”, I would have said “sorry, I don’t think that will work for me”, and we would have continued to talk about what turns us on. Instead we talked about designs that would turn us on.

In the end, I wrote to my tattooist and said, look at O’Keiffe and Japanese erotica. I mentioned a hummingbird taking nectar from a flower. When I showed up, he drew for 10 minutes, then tattooed for 5 hours. And I could not be happier.

I told him, I’d show my husband when I got home and timed how long it took him to find the NSFW bits.

Dear Reader: It was under 30 seconds and he is very pleased, too.

PS. I got home and pulled on my prophylactic arm sleeve and noticed the hummingbird and tiger lily motif that is basically the PG version of my tattoo!