Taquinto's Tattoo

       “Taquinto, Taquinto, how can you say that?”
      “Because it is true.”
      “You have not seen so much—your world is very small.”
      “Yes, but my eyes are big, I see all that goes on all around me,” the 21-year-old defended himself to the teacher, now retired.
      “When was the first time you saw that tattoo?  The face of Jesus, small like that?”
      “I saw it on a woman’s arm.  I thought it was very beautiful,” Taquinto replied.
      “Did it make her more beautiful?” the balding teacher wanted to know.  Who knew what color his hair had been? It was now completely gray.
      “No.  She was pretty plain.”
      “Pretty plain?  ‘Pretty’ in what way?” the ex-professor asked.
      “John, John, you caught me on that one!  May I call you ‘Juan’?”
      “No.  Tell me, was she showing other tattoos?”
      “Yes.  One—a butterfly—just above the crack in her ass.”
      “And was that butterfly also… beautiful?” the teacher asked.
      “Yes, given the surroundings.”
      “Is it something to focus on?”
      “It can be!” exclaimed the youth, feeling a bit risque.
      The teacher had another question; he always was full of questions.  And now that he had retired, he asked those questions that interested him, not just questions that keep a class going on topic.   “Which one of the tattoos did she get put on first, do you think?”
      Taquinto considered this seriously-asked question unimportant; but because if was Prof. Marsden, well, he tried to give answer.  “The colors of the butterfly were yellow, of course the blue, maybe there was some green.  It wasn’t like I was staring at it.  After a while, all the world’s butterflies on butts begin to look the same.”
      “And what of that portrait of Jesus? How similar are they?”
      “Well, the ink was not so clear; the eyebrows and the eyes were kind of merging.  The hair was a mass of black.”
      “Not at all like Jesus, eh Taquinto?”
      “I suppose not.”
      “I saw a man with a tattoo the other day, Taquinto, and I talked with him just as I am now talking with you.  He had a Incredible Hulk on his arm, high up.”
      “Incredible Hulk?  What’s that?” asked Taquinto, a little annoyed by the fact he did not know this figure.
      “He was a television creature:  monster with great strength one minute, and a regular guy that could bag your groceries, the next.  And he was green.”
      “Hey, Marsden, that’s stupid!  A green monster-guy on your arm!”
      “Ah, but when you saw it, you just knew this fellow could change himself into a ferocious guy—maybe he had virtue, too, like an old-fashioned knight.  A combination like that could be very helpful in this ragged world!”
      “Did he have a tattoo of a knight anywhere?” Taquinto questioned.
      “No, not that I could see.  Maybe the arm wasn’t big enough for both the knight with his horse. He can always go to the gym first and build up the size of it—give the tattoo artist more space to work with.”
      “You said you were talking to him.  What did he tell you?”
      “I had asked him when he got The Hulk on his arm.”
      “So, what did he say?”
      “Seems he got it done more than 20 years ago when he was touring in the Navy.  And,” Marsden laughed to say it, “that’s about when that show went off the air.”
      “So this Hulk was only a TV show and not quite a superhero, comic-style?”
      “I'm fairly sure it was just TV,” answered Prof. Marsden, “Hulk one minute, Tide super-strength cleaning power at the commercial break, the next.”
      “That’s stupid (on his part) to pick a symbol or emblem that's not going to be around long!” commented Taquinto with a clear disgust in his voice.
      “And that butterfly never flies away either, does it, young man?”
       "No.  But Jesus is a pretty good choice,” Taquinto just had to say.
      “Because people still talk about him after a couple of thousand years?”
      “Right!” exclaimed the 20 year old (he was thinking of getting a ‘Jesus’ tattoo).
      “What about showing Jesus with a quizzical expression on his face," offered Marsden, "and underneath, it has the words: ‘What would My Father do?’”  Marsden laughed over this 'cleverness' he thought he'd shown.
      “I asked you a question.  Is all you talked about was that ‘Hulk' tattoo?”
      “Okay.  I remember:  he said he wanted to show he was tough and could meet any Navy task or challenge; that he had a lot of strength to draw on, within. Plenty of chances for the Navy to call on your strength, I guess.”
      “So he defended it, even out of the Navy now?" Taquinto asked.
      Marsden had been making it a point to talk with several wearers of ink and had a conglomerate of ideas available to him for answering such as this question put to him.  “Typically, with outmoded design characters, people say, ‘My body is a chronicle of my life; it shows what was important to me as I went through it.’  But, the sagging skin and big paunch would be clearly visible and show the trends in his life as well, I think.  Don’t you agree?”
      “I feel a pressure on me to get my ink,” Taquinto confessed.  “It’s like I just have to get one—some thing—on my arm. Others have got to see it.”
      “What if I say, ‘If God wanted you to have some design on your arm, he would have given you a birthmark.’?”
      “That’s funny, Mr. Marsden.  Can I call you ‘John’?”
      “No.  It’s the teacher in me.  And who knows, I may be trying to teach you at this very minute.  You wouldn’t want to disrupt that with some familiarity, would you?”
      “I should think not," Taquinto sounded British in this. "‘Propinquity breeds contempt,’” he casually quoted Westermark from a discussion in his sociology course.
      “While we’re busy quoting authorities now, let’s discuss that verse from Leviticus that more people are aware of than I had thought.  I went on the Net recently and looked up tattoos and Christianity, and lo and behold, people with their ‘new’ Christian-motif tattoos are ready to talk about that verse, and with no little ‘authority’!  It’s clear in Leviticus 19:28 that we are not to disfigure our bodies in any way.  It says—and I remember the location of this Bible verse because I was 28 when I married, and that day was the 19^th of June—anyway, it tells ‘There must be no cutting into your flesh for the dead, or tattoo marks on you.  I am the Lord.’  That’s from the Berkeley Translation.  I always read that one.  You can’t run around looking for a different translation just when the one you trust most doesn’t fit your wishes at any given instant.  But the kids nowadays say and claim that verse refers to cutting yourself and drawing blood to show sympathy for the dead.  Did you see ‘The Devil’s Arithmetic’?  That’s a movie set in World War II and the concentration camps.  Depicted was the awful numbering of the workers in the camps, those Jews who were given ‘numbers’ while their names and dignity were being stolen from them.  Putting those numbers on each other was a bloody, painful affair!  It starred Brittany Murphy and Kirsten Dunst and was very, very moving.  It also shows the casual way today that people are going about putting on tattoos.  It wasn’t always that way! At times it meant real subjection—of the worst kind.”
      Taquinto was thinking.  A few moments later he came up with something he’d heard from another that should very well put Mr. Marsden and his old-fashioned ways in their place!
      “If my body ‘is the temple of the Holy Spirit', then I shall decorate it the way I choose!”  He laughed.
      “But as I’ve been speaking with you, has not the Holy Spirit cautioned you a little to listen to me and consider well what I say, and that the Scriptures—though few in number—might be saying what God wants to say, and in entirety?”
      “Yes, I have to admit that,” Taquinto replied.
      “Oh, Taquinto, Taquinto!  Don’t you see that one clear, unmistakable command in the Bible is sufficient for our direction?  God doesn’t tell over and over the same thing when He makes us smart enough to apply the lessons He teaches.  Proverbs Ten declares, ‘The mouth of the righteous is a fountain of life, but the mouth of the wicked conceals violence.’  Hear that but one time, and you ‘get the picture’.  He figures we’re smart enough to learn it when he tells us once.  And, look:  Leviticus 19:28, besides saying no cutting or marking, promptly displays the fact that ‘I am the Lord.’  It’s emphatic:  I am the Lord!”
      “I saw one cool tattoo on the net,” the young man protested.  "An Air Force guy had it.  Stationed in England or Scotland—one of those places.  Said he’d wanted a tattoo for years and years and that his wife had one.  A gecko.”
      “So did this ‘guy in the Air Force’ get a gecko, to keep hers company?” Marsden asked in mockery.  But he thought he sounded harsh—after all, it was not his own skin he was trying to save. He'd keep to the humor.
      “No," answered Taquinto.  "It was a cross made with nails.  Nails with big heads on them like what the Romans used.  And hanging on that cross was a Christian fish.  Blood red.”
      “The Christian Fish symbol was an early secret sign, you know, of the first Christians for when they'd meet and not know if the other was 'Christian' or not. The sandal would mark this way, and the other person's this way (Mr. Marsden was demonstrating it on the ground with his sandalled foot). Together, this made 'a fish.'"
      “So the cross was death, and if the wrong people saw you make a mark of a fish, that could be death too?” the young man asked.  But he didn’t wait for the old teacher's answer; instead, he told, “The first letters of some Greek phrase spell 'f-i-s-h', isn't that so?”
      “Fish, in Greek?  That may be.  So, if you only spoke Aramaic like in Mel Gibson's movie and no Greek, then this symbol was only good for identifying Christians and had no meaning by itself, right?” Marsden ‘threw’ it back at Taquinto.
      “I guess so. I don't know.”
      “Do you think those early Christians tattooed themselves to draw attention to their being new Christians?” Marsden asked.
      “No way!  You get spotted as a Christian in any way, and it was arrest for sure—at certain times in that history.”
      “Jesus wants us to be changed.  New life.  A new beginning, for each of us.  We don’t all have to ‘run with the pack’ and get a tattoo—any old tattoo—just so we can 'proudly,' simply show one! Hey, no longer need one.  Care for your body.  Preserve it the best you can.”  Marsden was through on the subject.
      Taquinto crossed his arms and thought more about Marsden's verse.  He didn’t want to disobey God.  He didn’t want to be cocky and claim to have the right to decorate the temple the way he chose—after all, God was very specific in the way the temple and the tabernacle were to be furnished and carved with interior decoration.  He thought of a girl once he’d seen working at McDonald’s and it had seemed that every time he went in there—no matter what the hour—there she was, working.  Taquinto had commented she must be getting a lot of overtime.  Was it that hard to fill the shifts?  “Oh, no,” she had replied, “I need money to get my tongue pierced, and it’s forty-five dollars.”  Taquinto had thought What a waste! at the time.  But here, now, he was thinking about a tattoo for himself.  And if it were on an arm in the open he couldn’t close his mouth so as to hide it.  He thought of that first woman with the picture of 'Jesus' on her arm.  That apparently hadn’t been enough for her; she’d gone out and gotten the butterfly.  Serendipity.  Lost touch with her reality of Jesus.  The Scriptures taught, he knew (Matthew 5:16) “Let your light shine among the people so that they may observe your lofty actions and give glory to your heavenly Father.”
      The tattoo, he realized, wasn’t an action or behavior that was a commitment to serving Christ and his brothers in the world, it was just like an ancient mark in the ground, not meaning much more.
      And it was Jesus, himself, who had said that—and he was the best authority figure, no doubt.

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