On August 18th, my youngest sister's birthday, I paid a nice man to stab me about 100 times a second for 4ish hours. As a result, I now carry this on my shoulder.
Red pandas are adorable creatures, if you're not familiar with them. They're like cuter, more agile raccoons. They're also quite fierce for their size, they're capable hunters, and are the only remaining creature from their family in the world. Watching them move, one can see certain resemblances to El Generico, especially in his tendency to thrown himself onto Kevin in celebration. I'm not a fan of a portrait tattoo, but I am very much a fan of an inside joke (or loving reference, if you prefer...)
A turnbuckle screw is pretty much my favorite wrestling tattoo. It's simple, elegant, and clear.
When I visit Charlotte, I always check to see that she still stands.
I love English, but there are some wonderful phrases and concepts we lack. Weltschmerz is probably my very favorite, but mono no aware is amazing. I don't even have your classic 'weeb's' understanding of Japanese language or culture, but that idea is very relevant to me, nonetheless. If you're not familiar, it's a big part of why cherry blossoms are so revered in Japan.
Finally, the piece of this tattoo that might be the most meaningful to me: 'a mark who persists'. This phrase comes from an essay by the brilliant and sweet @MithGifs. It's truer for me than she could ever have intended, and when I read it, it rang in my heart like a bell. I am a mark, a wrestling fan. I am a mark, a person who is open to the world, sometimes to the point of being naive and foolish.
And I persist. I persist through third world poverty and mental illness and PTSD and malnutrition. Through joy and its end, through disappointment and hurt, hurricanes and dreams and depression. Through Latin charts and thinking I should get a trade working with my hands since I'm good at trivia, but I'm not a good thinker, and then finding out better...
Normally when I get tattoos, I don't choose ones that are deeply meaningful. Things I care about, but small things--knives and thunderstorms and herbs--but nothing that if it was ruined, would really hurt me. This is the first time in almost fifteen years that I've put my heart and my love on the line--on my sleeve, in fact. It's still relatively safe: El Generico is retired among the orphans, after all. The chance that he'll come back and do something terrible are statistically negligible. But it could happen, and it would crush me...
In those terms, a tattoo like this is like a moonsault: a blind leap of trust. Anytime we trust, we do so knowing that trust could be broken. Life is life, and anything could happen.
But we do it anyway. Because it matters, because we care, because...if we did otherwise, we simply wouldn't be who we are.
Wrestling is entirely made of trust, I think. (It can also be made entirely of art, or love--that's wrestling physics for you) The most urgent is the trust between workers, but the base level is the trust of the audience. We trust them to entertain us. We trust them to tell us stories, and to hurt us in the best ways, with sorrow and with purest joy. And they trust us to show up, to cheer, to shyly say hi at the merch table, to care...to trust them.
So we climb up, unsteady, pulse racing, and we jump off, trusting that they will catch us, as they always have before.
May it always be so.
Love,
Beck