When I was a kid, my mom had two big rules she made abundantly clear to my siblings and I.

1. Never ride on a motorcycle
2. No tattoos

As a midwestern Catholic who grew up with a lawyer as a father, my mother really exceeded both in winning arguments and weaponizing guilt.

She kept a tree stump in the garden among the stone fairies that decorated the flowerbeds. Whenever we sat on it to watch her plant red pansies and purple begonias in the dark soil, she would turn to us and tell us about a young man she knew in her 20s who died when his motorcycle ran into the very tree that the stump came from. He was her friend, and she kept the piece of the tree that killed him in order to keep his memory alive and (I suppose) to anecdotally scare her children away from ever riding one.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have the same poetic prop and story combo for tattoos. So, she resorted to threats. “If you ever, ever get a tattoo, you will never get Christmas presents ever again.” It was a threat I took seriously for a while. If tattoos offended Santa Clause, then they offended ME. I think it’s also the reason why I was always so standoffish about tattoos as I became an adult. That and I would never put Christmas in peril.

In any case, a few weeks after getting my MA and finishing school last month, I decided I wanted a tattoo. I had been thinking about getting one for a while, always a quote from Plath’s “Fever 103,” but I never acted on the impulse. Until I did.

I did it on a whim with my friend. I was a little nervous. I couldn’t help but remember my mother adminently protesting against any permanent body modification. But, at this point in my life she had been dead for nearly ten years, and her protests felt distant.

I thought getting the quote scratched onto my arm would make me feel changed–maybe edgier or freer, but it didn’t end up feeling that way. I didn’t feel different at all–which is nice. I am that I am.

Even in the relatively short stretch between my girlhood and now, people’s attitudes have changed regarding tattoos and even my mother ended up getting one (ON HER HEAD) at one point. Both my sisters have tattoos, my brother has tattoos AND rides a motorcycle.

All this to say that opinions are like smoke and even the things our mothers tell us, the stories they weave & their efforts to protect us, eventually fades away. People have to make their own choices no matter what guidance may have defined them as children.

And I like my tattoo! If Santa has an issue with that he can fight me.

Fever 103°

BY SYLVIA PLATH

Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple

Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean

The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
The indelible smell

Of a snuffed candle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright

One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel,
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,

But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak

Hothouse baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,

Devilish leopard!
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour.

Greasing the bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.

Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.

Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.

I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern——

My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.

Does not my heat astound you! And my light!
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.

I think I am going up,
I think I may rise——
The beads of hot metal fly, and I love, I

Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,

By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean!
Not you, nor him

Nor him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)——
To Paradise.