I didn't want this tattoo

on empty consent, part two

This is Part Two of a long essay about consent, so it’ll make more sense if you read Part One first!

CW: Brief mentions of revenge porn

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In recent months, memories of my creepy encounter with N 15 years ago have bubbled aggressively to the surface because I started the process of having a tattoo removed. Sitting on a gray microfiber pad while a heavily tattooed man shoots lasers I cannot see at my raw skin from a massive, chest-sized machine has been, in every way, quite an impetus to think about what has led me here.

(Yes, the process is as horrible as news outlets describe. Yes, it is significantly worse than getting tattooed. The best I can explain of the pico laser is like a tiny, burning needle ripping into your skin at high speed. Even after applying a local anesthetic and aggressively numbing the area with ice, the pain is barely tolerable for the duration of my session — all of maybe two minutes.

It doesn’t end just with the needle’s burn, however. There’s also the smell. Smell particles activate more intensely in the presence of water and heat — hence why we often hear of “hot garbage” — so in between the hot laser repeatedly hitting the little bones of my spine, and me sweating while gritting my teeth with all my willpower, the scent of seared flesh is nothing short of morbidly discombobulating.)

Immediately after pico treatment, carbon dioxide is released from the skin and forms this white “frosting.” Very gross.

The tattoo in question is a lotus in the middle of my back, with the text “while daring greatly.” It isn’t hideous. I wouldn’t even classify it as ugly. It’s not profane, and the message (if asked, once explained) is decently meaningful.

All that it’s not, however, is overshadowed by what it is: a physical reminder of how empty my consent is in the world I live in.

I’ve had this tattoo since 2011, when I first moved to NYC to find my way. The words are from Theodore Roosevelt, quoted at my college commencement, which I eagerly submitted alongside my favorite flower (a lotus, for strength) to a high-SEO-ranked, well-Yelped shop in the Lower East Side.

On the day of my appointment, my designated artist — a random white man whose name I’ve long forgotten, or maybe he never told me to begin with — started our encounter visibly irritated. Unbeknownst to me, a scheduling mishap had occurred with my appointment, leading him to accuse me right off the bat: “You canceled last week.”

(The system did not update his calendar after I rescheduled. But even if I did cancel, does that matter?)

A tense explanation later, he informed me we were working on a compressed timeline: “I drew up something, but I threw it away already.” Only a few words, but the message was clear: you lost your chance for revisions.

I remember waiting in full view of the shop’s glass doors as he disappeared to resketch my design. Only a meter or two between my feet and the exit, but thousands of reminders of why standing up would violate a pact between me, my body, and the universe.

That might offend him, and he is already upset with you.

It’s your fault he’s in a bad mood. You have to accept the consequences of your actions.

Best you can do now is appease. You don’t know what might happen if he becomes angrier.

I cannot pinpoint who these voices belong to. They are not just of my mother, who has been rendered responsible for my dad’s emotions since she married him at 21. Hypervigilance is a woman’s duty, she likes to remind me; if I know what bothers my partner, I shouldn’t ever let those things happen.

There is some tenor of aunties, past and present, eager to offer advice on how to remove any conflict from daily life. It’s simple, really — do not impregnate conversations with your own bothersome emotions. No man enjoys such histrionics.

There are definitely inflections of others’ parents, teachers, and acquaintances, their gleeful gossip in response to my own (and millions of other exes) spreading revenge porn being, “That’s on her. She should’ve known better.”

Seeing my body as an instrument to either be surveilled, managed, or used in service for men is something I absorbed not just from the impositions of men, but the rationalizations of women. Without fail, I hear their voices overlapping daily: diversions created by those unwilling, or perhaps unable, to recognize the fact that power rests not in what you can do, but in what you can get away with doing.

I can’t recall how long it took for that tattoo artist to sketch the foundation of my self-hatred for going on 13 years.

Was it five minutes? Ten? I doubt it was fifteen.

What I do remember is when he brings the final reveal, everything in his design is wrong. Instead of soft petals with dainty lines, the lotus is sharp and pokey, like Bart Simpson’s hair. The aggressive shading makes the entire flower look leaden. And the font? It’s chicken scratch, something I imagine a prepubescent boy would dig into the dirt of his school’s baseball pit after he’d been benched.

I hated it with every ounce of my being. So of course I said, in a voice so small and pathetic it still haunts me with shame, “Yeah, okay.”

My tattoo artist friend Michelle Neo tells me there finally exists discourse — albeit limited — in the tattoo community about this kind of empty consent. Even in the presence of words that technically mean “yes,” the tattoo artist should not proceed to, as she calls it, “physically brand another person” without enthusiastic consent. This lens acknowledges consent as a structural consideration, instead of diagnosing it on an individual basis disconnected from the broader systems we live in. It holds especially true for clients with overlapping marginalized identities, most aware of how much their bodies are still viewed as sites of contested ownership.

I try my best not to obsess over how things would’ve been different had she taken his place that day. Her calm, measured follow-up questions the antithesis of his shrug and a beckon to the back room. In the present, Michelle writes me after I send her a draft of this piece to review, “Above my station, I have a print of these client affirmations. I hope it can serve as another reminder for you, too.”

If you notice a slight edge to how I write of my tattoo encounter, that isn’t your imagination. I walked into that shop, hoping with my whole body for a chance to forgive myself. This cool place with electric rock music and vintage AC/DC posters, it was engaging in resistance against a society that promotes and rewards a man happy to mock my agency with an ice cream bar, right? These body artists, in their ripped denim vests on lug-soled black boots, surely they didn’t view women with the same entitlement as my ex over private photos — mere collateral damage in a quest for status.

This was the height of my Lean In era, even if the book had not yet hit shelves. My reconfiguring of consent was on the same wavelength as Sandberg’s feminism: individualized change for large-scale results. If I could shift how I saw myself — from a scared little intern and violated ex-girlfriend to an empowered, black-shift-dress-wearing, big-city professional — it might just be reflected back in how the world treated me.

I bought into the lie of white counterculturalism because I wanted to believe there was a space where I mattered. My heart was tender. I was unprepared for its veneer of social defiance to wholesale collapse because a man felt slighted.

I reckon it must’ve been inconvenient, a woman’s desires complicating their narratives of ‘radicalness’ and ‘allyship.’ Impossible, even, to reconcile the reality that, much like white dominant culture, practicing counterculturalism absent intersectional analysis is ultimately unconcerned with liberating anything beyond its constituent’s own egos.

The fact this incident has certainly been long forgotten in this man’s mind, but literally and metaphorically scarred me for over a decade, is more than just a little ironic. Especially within a self-proclaimed “safe space,” it is a testament to how much a woman’s safety is still predicated on a man’s consent.

I never refer to this tattoo as “my” tattoo. It is not, no matter how long I carry it on my body.

Nonetheless, it is the gift that keeps on giving: when I arrived for my tattoo removal consultation, I was told in classic Singaporean fashion — that is, somewhat unceremoniously — this tattoo artist was as unqualified as he was nonchalant. That day, he had gone too far into my skin with his ink, and the tattoo had developed keloids all over.

“Too deep. Cannot fully remove,” the store owner, Mark, assesses with a tsk. He is a fast-talking man, good-natured enough to publicly call himself a Boomer on TikTok, and not in the least delicate with his delivery. “I can lighten it though.”

I gape at him. “What’s even the point then?” The accusation comes out before I can form it more diplomatically.

Mark wasn’t done explaining — the point of lightening up a tattoo is that it can be better covered by a new one — but what my brain immediately heard was: forever.

Forever sullied by this random man, but of course not vice versa; just as we hold women captive to the man* of their first sexual indoctrination, no matter how insignificant or traumatic, but never vice versa.

In the face of paying four times the price of my tattoo to have it partially beamed off, I wondered if this was a sign that I ought to take the route of many others. After all, it was my fault, was it not? It was I who was the coward, who didn’t dissent properly, who gave up my opportunity to be free of this. You have to accept the consequences of your actions. Perhaps the best option now was to never speak of this shame again, in hopes that living in silence would allow me to outrun it.

In her essay, I Spent My Life Consenting to Touch I Didn’t Want, Melissa Febos writes that she’d kept mum about a non-consensual sexual encounter for decades because:

I felt deeply embarrassed, not only for myself…but also for him, because I knew he had done wrong. But somehow, it was his wrongs that embarrassed me, as if it were rude of me to remember them.

I, too, felt embarrassed by my long memory. My ongoing pain over something everyone else so readily accepted as nothing. Indeed, my insistence on a full removal was a fantasy of reversing time, of amnesia. I did not want to admit that I had come in for this consultation under the same false pretense as the tattoo shop that scarred me: a desire to pretend disguised as resistance.

What would it mean to make amends, then? To lift my internalized blame for being too weak to stand up for myself in the moment and “complaining” later? To receive my whole self against the backdrop of this country — with 31 states that indoctrinate bodies of 16-year-old girls as legal, even if the rest of her is not?

The same Melissa Febos writes in Body Work:

The resistance to memoirs about trauma is always in part — and often nothing but — a resistance to movements of social justice.

Those who benefit from the inequities of our society resist the stories of people whose suffering is in large part owed to the structures of our society.

To write this series has been my small act of reclamation. To put my needs above others’ expectations of my feelings and give myself the permission I long looked to others for. To affirm both the women who intuitively understand this story as well as those who dismiss and reject it: I see how you’ve learned to live, and it is valid.

After the last newsletter, I received a flurry of emails from other women. “I, too, ate the ice cream,” one writes me.

My heart twinges reading her note, and I reach out to instinctively touch my back. My skin there is rough and scabby now, the tattoo — still bruised but healing — just a bare shade lighter than before. I marvel at us strangers, processing our grief in parallel, each at our own rhythm, and I hug myself for doing the work of remembering who I am. Someone who can not only do hard things, but has already done the hardest thing: to keep going.

P.S. I now work exclusively with women of color tattoo artists. At a recent session, I hesitantly asked if we could try a different placement of my tattoo (a white rabbit in candy form on my left shoulder, an ode to my Chinese heritage and The Matrix). I was still so nervous to request a change. It’s hard to describe how it felt to have her nod easily and respond most graciously, “You’re welcome to move it however many times you want.”

*Queer women are subject to this bind in their own unique way, with their orientation often being called into question if they do not have a sexual experience with a man, or only experiences with men cast as “real” sex.

P.P.S. A video update of my second pico treatment below:

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Memes from the Last Week

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Personal Things From the Last Week

Listening: Ryuichi Sakamoto, maestro like no other. (His final film, Opus, had me bawling for 2 hours straight. RIP.)

Watching: Sense8

(Re-)Reading: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which never fails to pull me out of despair and give me hope

Eating: Bak chor mee and pulut tai tai, two of my favorite things in Singapore so far

Drinking: Sugarcane juice, truly nothing like it

Nice thing I did for myself this week: I cleared my schedule when I needed to rest and recover from jetlag without feeling guilty