The Painted Lady

Now, I have quite a few tattoos. For the longest time I never got any tattoo below the bicep, so I could at least cover them up for work and so on. It got to the point where I would forget about them at times or just didn’t register them when I saw them in the mirror. But when I began teaching in Japan I took even greater care to never show my ink, I would even thicker or darker shirts to prevent the dark ink from showing through the cloth. Even at the height of summer which, lemme tell you, was quite awful for a woman who was built for colder climates.

Because of my tattoos I had to pass up many opportunities to experience the public bathhouses, hot springs, and more. Unless, of course, I went at a time so late that no one was around. Over the course of my career I had colleagues and fellow staff invite me along to bathe or to spas to get me to either just experience new things or to hang out and get to know me better. I had to, sadly, decline each time. I hadn’t even shown my tattoos to the woman I started dating, fearing what with how rare it was to find someone who was, let’s say, homosexually inclined, that I would scare her away with the tattoos. Looking back I can say that I was overreacting and the Japanese aren’t, to my knowledge, as hard on foreigners with tattoos as they are on fellow Japanese with tattoos.

With all that preface outta the way, the story at hand. It was well into my second year of teaching and I had the pleasure of teaching English and homeroom at a prefectural highschool. I got along well with staff and students alike and was generally enjoying myself, all the while still hiding my tattoos away. But I did drop my guard that year in an event that may not be as embarrassing to many folks but to me it was mortifying.

School trips weren’t a rare occurrence and on one such trip the students and faculty stayed at a rather nice hotel with an open air bath on the ground floor. It was the final day of the trip, all the students were in their rooms for the night and two of my colleagues, whom I had become fast friends with, invited me to join them for a relaxing bath. It had been a long day with plenty of excitement so my eagerness got the better of me and I quickly agreed. I never even thought about the fact that I would be exposing one of my biggest kept secrets, I just wanted to relax and chat with my friends. It wasn’t until we were in the changing room and I had my shirt halfway unbuttoned that I remembered, “oh yea, I have quite a few tattoos”. I froze, my mind blanked, and I couldn’t think of a way to escape the situation without being incredibly awkward. So I bit back my fears and shed layers, my colleagues going silent around me as I stripped.

From my shoulders to my lower back, set in dark ink and grey wash style, two ravens sat upon the antlers of a stoic deer, two snarling hounds framing its portrait. Celtic knotwork wound over the tops of my shoulders to my biceps and below my collar, above my breast, were the fierce pictures of a bear and dragon. I could feel the other three women looking at me and I tried not to look too embarrassed, wrapping myself in a towel and walking out into the baths. Luckily, they were kind and more curious than put off by my tattoos, one even marveling at the depth of detail in the works. The mood quickly became light hearted and I eased back into a comfortable feeling as we continued to talk, thinking the worst was over.

It was not.

As we’re soaking in the open air bath of the hot spring, talking lightheartedly, a group of girls from another class walked in. It wasn’t yet curfew so they had no reason not to be there, but damned if I even thought about any student wandering down for a soak before bed. I immediately sank up to my neck in the water, trying my best to look casual yet hide everything below but, no dice. The hot water seemed to only make my tattoos stand out more against my skin and sitting amongst three, rather pale, women, there was no hiding and the girls who joined us noticed immediately.

Nothing ill came of my having tattoos, even as word spread like wildfire among students and staff alike. The dean did have to pull me aside to speak to me but luckily it was merely to work out an excuse and chalking it all up to cultural differences. He just asked me not to actively show off my now famous ink works nor encourage students to get tattoos of their own. Of course I agreed and spent the remainder of that school year batting away or redirecting questions pertaining to my renowned secret.

If anything good came from this it was that I would later reveal my tattoos to my girlfriend and we would laugh off my silly fears of her leaving me over such a thing. In fact, I think she secretly liked them. Still, the whole event left quite an impression on me.