This is what I got myself for my birthday last month. 

I’m a professional. I am so NOT a hipster. I listen to NPR. I’m nearing forty. I’m not the tattoo type, and I felt a little out of place at Shogun Tattoo (although Andy was very nice and did a beautiful job – even though it wasn’t his usual style.) I‘m not supposed to have a big red and orange phoenix on my forearm.  But now – by my own decision and my credit card – it is a permanent part of my anatomy. 

It’s probably not environmentally responsible, what with all the single-use needles and not-exactly-biodegradable ink. It’s an extravagance to waste $200 on a tattoo during a global economic crisis. I could have donated the money to any number of non-profits who desperately need the money. I could have put it toward my credit card debt.

But I didn’t. I knew three years ago that I wanted to get a phoenix tattoo, but I always felt like I needed to wait until a symbol of resurrection on my skin felt more like reality.  I need to be more together, happier, more financially stable, more this, more that – more than what I was and what I am. 

Something clicked in the week before my birthday, and I knew that it was time - even if I don’t have it all figured out, even if I’m alone, even if PTSD still sometime kicks my butt, even if my internal radio still gets stuck on “You Suck” FM, even if it hurts my employability, even if,  even if, even if…I needed to step into new life, to irreversibly tell myself that it’s time to fly.

It’s an intention, a promise, and a ritual all rolled into one. It’s a reminder of the extremely obvious variety that I have been re-born the past few years, that I am being re-born, and that I will find more new life in the future. (And that’s me sounding inadvertently Catholic.)

So maybe it’s somehow fitting that when I got home from getting my tattoo, I realized that it was Ash Wednesday. Usually, to get this particular tattoo artist, you have to make an appointment two weeks in advance (a month on the weekends), and usually, he takes Wednesdays off. However, I dropped by on Tuesday, and he said he was going to be in the next day for another job.  Since he was going to be there already, he decided he might as well fit me in. I will take that as serendipitous.

To find my sanity, I have rejected the notion that my deepest self is a sinner prostrate in dust and ashes, praying for a savior to have mercy on my dark and wicked soul. I don’t know if Jesus died on the cross for me or for anybody or if he just died. I don’t know if I am saved, but I do know that I believe in death and resurrection. I believe that sometimes you have to live as if something is true before you are entirely sure about it. 

Did I mention that it hurt? It took almost two hours, by the end of which I was rather desperately ready for him to be done.  My tattoo artist was, rather unsurprisingly, heavily tattooed and he talked about how hard it is and how much it hurts to spend a full day getting tattooed, but how it’s worth it if that’s what it takes to get in with a really good artist. The pain is part of the art.

Needles hurt more than ashes – quite a bit more actually - but no one ever said that resurrection doesn’t sting or bleed. My phoenix is still flaking and scabby and not what it will be, but it is indelibly there. I looked through at least 200 phoenix tattoos on the internet and immediately resonated with the design now on my arm. My dear friend Jen (who I am reasonably certain has never ever wanted a tattoo, even for a minute) saw this design and said, “That one’s cool!  It’s coming out of the flames, and it IS the flames.” 

Transformation doesn’t mean that the pain all goes away. Bad things happened. Bad things still do. Some things that are lost are never found again, and I will always have a few broken bits in my psyche.  I have holes and scars, but those can be a part of me, and even made beautiful, until you can’t really tell the flames from feathers. 

It isn’t cheap. I paid for this tattoo, and for my resurrection in more way than one – and I have the credit card debt to prove it. That is part of what I like about it – that it was me (with a lot of help from friends and happy pills and therapy and the Mysterious Divine) that got me to the spot where I could put a resurrecting flaming bird in flight on my arm.  

I keep looking at it thinking, “Dang – it’s big.” and feeling happy that, for once in my life, I went bigger than I planned, that after a lifetime of trying hard to be invisible, I decided to be an attention-getter.  (Although since I live in L.A., with a relatively high concentration of tattoos per capita, it’s not as much of an attention getter as it might be somewhere else.)

I want to write more about my spirtuality search in 2009, I just have to stop staring at my arm first.

Christy Lambertson lives in Los Angeles, where she makes rather good mojitos, refuses to root for the Lakers, and blogs at Dry Bones Dance.