If I were to get a tattoo -- tattoos -- and you know, I think I can -- I'd get a cicada on my upper thigh, a magpie on my upper arm, the garden of the gods on my ankle. Is that how you're supposed to get tattoos? The cicada would be from the memory of going to Missouri on family reunions growing up. How some summers, that one summer, the cicadas were everywhere. Flying drunk into your hair. Slamming themselves against sliding glass doors. Offering themselves up to the fish in the lake for food. (The fish got tired of them.)
The bird would be for myself. My bird animal. The one I'd want of myself on my cousin Becky, who gets birds for close people who have died in her life. A blue heron for our grandfather. A blue jay for her sister Angie. I don't think I can ask for a spot myself on her skin (maybe to be reserved like a plot in a cemetery), but I could get myself one on myself. She does birds of others. Is it telling that I would get a bird which means myself?
The garden of the gods is obvious. It's for where I grew up. That familiar arrangement of rocks, jutting up straight out of the ground where the tectonic plates crashed into each other. A place to ride my bike. To remember that even though I tell people I'm from flat boring Colorado Springs -- the place without any springs -- that I'm really from somewhere else. A tiny town making bank off of taxing the county's weed. The one with actual springs: Manitou Springs.
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