Tattoo Gate

I once ruined an entire family holiday by getting a tattoo.

At least, that was the version of events I was left with.

I was about twenty-seven or twenty-eight at the time. Fully grown. Living my own life. And this wasn't even my first tattoo.

It was my third.

A Hamsa hand — the Hand of Fatima — tattooed on my right hip. An ancient protective symbol, often associated with strength, resilience, feminine power. For me it felt like confidence. Something that belonged on my body.

My mum and dad both disliked tattoos, although for very different reasons.

My dad's dislike had a history behind it. His boss had been one of the Windermere Boys, a Holocaust survivor who had been tattooed with a number during the war. For my dad, tattoos had become tangled up with that memory of human beings being forcibly marked and reduced to numbers.

I could understand why he felt the way he did.

But understanding somebody's feelings doesn't mean living your life according to them.

And, importantly, my dad didn't. He might not have liked my tattoos, but when he saw this one, he wasn't particularly bothered. He didn't join in with what happened next.

My mum did.

This particular crisis happened in Skiathos. My dad was retiring, and the family were already on the island celebrating. I wasn't supposed to be there — I'd arranged to surprise him.

I remember arriving and meeting my sister-in-law, Sarah, walking with me towards the tennis club where everyone was gathered around the pool. Nobody knew I was coming.

There is something lovely about surprising somebody you love like that. For a few seconds, everything is pure reaction. Confusion. Recognition. Then excitement. *What are you doing here? I can't believe you've come.* Hugs and noise and everyone talking at once.

I'd travelled all the way to Greece because I wanted to be there for my dad. For a little while, that was what the moment was about.

Then I took my sarong off.

My mum saw the tattoo.

And that was Tattoo Gate.

There wasn't a conversation. There was an explosion.

This tiny Hamsa hand on the hip of her twenty-something-year-old daughter somehow became an event large enough to change the emotional weather of the holiday. Not disappointed. Not mildly irritated. Furious.

And then came the silence. For about three days, my mum barely spoke to anybody. At the time, it felt like five. Maybe that's what silence does when you're living inside it — it stretches.

She withdrew from almost everyone: my dad, my brother, Sarah, Sarah's mum and dad, me. Seven people, effectively living underneath the emotional consequence of one tattoo on one person's body.

My dad didn't join in. He didn't particularly like the tattoo — he didn't suddenly become a tattoo enthusiast — but he carried on speaking to me. He carried on being my dad.

That distinction matters to me now. Two people can dislike the same thing and still choose completely different ways of responding to 

Eventually, when she did speak, she ripped me a new one. She didn't hold back — told me everything she hated about the tattoo, called it ugly, was nasty about it in a way that felt like she thought the words themselves might make it disappear from my body.

She couldn't get over it. As if I'd put a dagger in her heart. She brought up my first tattoo too — how upset she'd been then — so why would I go and do that to her again.

It was a real fuck you to my mum, apparently.

Families develop strange ways of deciding who caused what.

Somewhere along the way, the story became: Fran ruined the holiday because she got a tattoo.

Not: Mum became so angry about Fran's tattoo that she stopped speaking to people for several days.

Those two sentences describe the same sequence of events. But they assign responsibility to completely different people.

For years I don't think I understood that distinction. I had made the decision that came first — I got the tattoo — so everything that followed must somehow belong to me too. If I hadn't got the tattoo, Mum wouldn't have been angry. If Mum hadn't been angry, she wouldn't have stopped talking. If she hadn't stopped talking, everyone would have had a lovely holiday.

Trace the chain far enough backwards and eventually you reach me. My body. My tattoo.

My fault.

Except there's another adult in that chain of events. And adults are responsible for what they do with their feelings. Someone can hate your tattoo, can think you've made a terrible decision, can privately wonder why you'd permanently put something on your body they'd never put on theirs. They're allowed all of that. My dad did, in his own way.

What they do next is still theirs.

I was twenty-seven or twenty-eight. It shouldn't matter — bodily autonomy doesn't arrive with a particular birthday — but I wasn't a teenager testing boundaries. I wasn't asking permission. I wasn't even announcing anything. My mum discovered something about my body because I happened to be standing beside a swimming pool in a bikini.

And yet I remember the feeling of being caught. Caught doing what? Having a body that belonged to me?

You can be an adult, with your own home, your own partner, your own passport, and still find yourself standing by a swimming pool feeling as though you've been summoned to the headteacher's office.

There's something almost fitting about the tattoo itself. A symbol I'd chosen because it meant protection. Strength. A reminder of being held, guarded, capable. And there I was, wearing this tiny symbol of strength on my hip while feeling as though I'd done something shameful simply because I'd chosen something for myself.

I didn't understand the irony at the time. I do now.

My dad had arguably the strongest reason of anyone there to dislike tattoos. His association with them wasn't fashion or taste — it was connected to somebody he knew who'd been forcibly marked during one of the darkest periods in human history.

And yet he didn't punish me for having one. He didn't stop speaking to me. He didn't make the holiday revolve around his discomfort.

He was allowed to dislike it. I was allowed to have it. Those two things managed to exist at the same time.

Getting a tattoo I liked, on my own hip, apparently amounted to a fuck you.

I've turned that sentence over a lot of times since.

I still can't find the fuck you in it.

I can only find the strength of the hand.