Branded

“What do your tattoos mean to you?” He asked.

They mean to remind me of how I’ve overcome. My first tattoo is across my forearm. I got this tattoo with a friend over my birthday. Each tattoo was a birthday gift, actually. After being shunned from a community that I spent two years with, I grieved so many people and things that I lost touch with my identity and purpose. I opened my Bible to read from Song of Solomon and I had this impression from God, “You are not a burden to me, you are the rose. Your weaknesses cannot intimidate me, I call you the lily.” This meant so much to me that each time I’d see it, I’d cry remembering that only an Invisible King could understand my state of pain and heal me. Not the Hallmark Card Pity or a pat on the back from a family member, but God and time and healing.

Have you ever felt so broken, so upset with your state of mind of being that you became so desperate for affirmation? This tattoo was my private and constant fill for affirmation.

My second tattoo was another random birthday treat. My friend’s husband and she were in town that weekend and offered me a “stick-and-poke.” I’m seemingly most spontaneous on my birthday, and so I took them up on it!

The Vikings placed two X’s beside each other to symbolize the popular phrase, “Where there is a will, there is a way.”

During that year, I’d been living in a new state apart from all of my family, without a car, without steady income and while attending classes for advanced skincare. Still, I was able to pay rent, eat, have perfect attendance and grades in college and part participate in extracurriculars. Because I had the mind to do it, I did it. I’ll never forget I have that superpower.

Last, but not least, “bird set free🕊” was marked one year from my set wedding date (April 24th, 2016). My situation there drove me into this spiraling flashback of all the toxic relationships I’d been in my entire life. I saw myself as a baby in the hospital, premature by two months and in an “incubator” nicknamed Birdie; I was always dealt with as though I’m a fragile girl, with great things said around me and unfortunate things done to me. Though these (toxic) people had saved face well, they held me captive by their own selfish gain. To protect them self from dealing with their issues of jealousy, strife, envy, agitation and comparison, they chose to have control and try to manipulate me to sit down and act this way.

I finally felt free! Toxic relationships had no place in my life any longer. I was finished, my discernment stronger and my ability to stand up for myself was not going to bow to anyone ever again! I declared myself then, a bird set free.

I think I’m finished getting tattoos. I think? These three have been impressionable reminders and have nurtured others in similar ways. I’ve even had other girls tattoo my tattoo’d phrases to their body because it spoke to them in just as powerful a message and impression as with me. It’s the reminder that I haven’t always had such peace, but I have worked for and fought for it. I’ll never forget my story while living in the testimony of goodness and newness.

What do your tattoo’s mean for you?