Skin Deep

I wake in the dark, my skin damp against unfamiliar sheets. The ceiling above me is a smudge of shadow, indistinct, as if painted over by someone careless. My breathing is shallow, uneven, and the silence in the room feels so loud it buzzes. I reach for the comfort of orientation—something familiar, a lamp or a clock but my arms fall heavily, unsupported by any object. I am not at home.

Sliding my feet to the floor, I stand and let the cool surface steady me. My body trembles with the uncertainty of not knowing where I am. The bed is behind me, the walls indistinct shapes pressing in. I grope forward until my hand grazes the frame of a door. Without thinking, I push it open.

The moment I step through, I am blinded. Sunlight floods the world so violently that I stagger backward, shielding my face. It is not the gentle morning light that wakes people in quiet bedrooms; it is a white blaze that burns everything into clarity. And in that brightness, I see myself.

My arms are no longer bare. Lines, symbols, and swirls cover them, inked in patterns that crawl over my skin. My hands are blackened by geometry, my chest a mural of stories I do not remember living. My throat is circled by chains of ink, and when I stumble to a mirrored window, I see that my face, too, is carved with designs. I am tattooed from head to toe.

Panic rises like a tide. My skin feels invaded, colonized. I press at my arms as though I could rub the markings away, but they do not smudge. They are part of me now, a declaration I never consented to make. Each image seems to scream a label, a definition, an identity chosen on my behalf. And in that moment I understand the terror: I have been marked permanently, categorized involuntarily.

That is always when I wake.

For years, this dream repeated itself—always beginning in that suffocating darkness, always ending with the same blinding revelation. Each time I woke gasping, my body slick with sweat, my hands clawing at my arms as though the ink might still be there. I would flick on the lamp beside my real bed and stare in relief at the smooth, unmarked surface of my skin.

It took me a long time to understand what my mind was showing me. I don’t have tattoos in waking life. I have never even wanted one. But the images weren’t about tattoos themselves—they were about permanence, about being defined by others in ways I couldn’t erase. Every mark represented the fear of being trapped by other people’s judgments, by their words and assumptions about who I was.

When I finally realized this, the dreams stopped. The night terrors ended as if my subconscious had handed me the answer and washed its hands of the ritual. I slept without interruption, the darkness calm again.

But the fear didn’t vanish. In fact, its absence in sleep only made it clearer in daylight. I still carry it with me: the dread of being labeled before I can speak, of being pressed into categories that do not fit, of being tattooed invisibly by people’s perceptions.

Now, when I wake in the night and the room is truly dark, I run a palm across my bare arm and remind myself the skin is clean. Yet I also know the invisible ink exists outside of me, in the glances and whispers of others, in the way society tries to pin a person down like a specimen.

The dream gave me a metaphor I can’t forget. My skin may remain unmarked, but I live with the knowledge that labeling doesn’t require needles or ink. It happens every day, in subtler, sharper ways. And unlike dreams, those marks don’t fade when the morning comes.