Literary Tattoos

I never thought I would ever seriously consider getting a tattoo. I just never thought of myself as a person who could want something permanently inked on her body. I never thought there was something wrong with getting a tattoo, I just assumed I couldn't pull it off. Then the last Harry Potter film came out the summer after my freshman year. I was excited and dreading it at the same time as this marked, in my mind, the end of my childhood. While that was a hyperbole, I didn't realize it at the time and was convinced that I wanted the Deathly Hallows symbol tattooed on my wrist. My father was always against this and has come around a bit more now. I do not have any tattoos. Yet. I still love Harry Potter and would love to have a tattoo or something to honor it, but now that I have grown up, I have found myself immersed in new literature.

My sophomore year on a snowy January day, I picked up F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. I started it on a field trip and read it until the last page in my bed at the end of the night. As I cried with the last few pages I knew that this book would become one of my favorites and honestly is one of them still. I adore the very last line of the novel, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." (I think it's on page 286 or something in one of my editions). This line I love because in my mind it goes with the whole book. The characters in Gatsby are infatuated with their pasts, Gatsby with Daisy, Daisy with her life with Gatsby or early life with Tom, Tom with his football glory days, and Nick who is hung up on what happened during the summer of 1922 in the West Egg. I just wrote a paper on this idea actually and it made me realize again my love for this novel. If I ever were to get a tattoo, it would be a literary one. The final line for Gatsby would have to be one of them, and most likely my first tattoo.

I also love T.S. Eliot as a poet, as the lost generation is something that fascinates me and I want to read everything by them so I can understand this time period that I feel a longing for. One of his lines from his poem, "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock", has also made an impact on me. While this is one quote that is in my English teacher's room, whose room is filled with quotes, it's one I've admired since my first reading of the poem.
"Do I dare
Disturb the universe?"

For those two lines, it just makes me feel an indescribable feeling, as though I can do anything I want. I can disturb the universe, but do I dare? It reminds me to question myself sometimes but also to take risks. The final line of Gatsby reminds me to remember my past but to be able to move on from it unlike the cast of characters in the novel.

I adore literary tattoos, whether it's from Le Petit Prince, which was the first literary tattoo I had ever seen, to Harry Potter and everything in between. I'd love to get a literary tattoo one day and I hopefully will. I just have to decide whether or not to chicken out.