My first tattoo was a talisman. This tattoo is my badge of honor

Two years ago, when I received my tattoo through the Healing Ink project, I viewed my gift as a talisman: a thing of beauty and meaning that would accompany me everywhere, all the time. I wanted to see it while getting dressed and made up in the mornings, to motivate me for the new day. I wanted to be able to touch it in times of threat, while sitting in my safe room a mile from the border with the Gaza Strip, waiting to hear the explosion of the rocket heralded in by the Code Red incoming rocket warning. It is a red anemone, the flower that blooms after the winter rains, on a stem of the word “Resilience.” To remind myself that I had this.

A friend warned me: “Careful, tattoos can become an addiction!”

“Don’t worry,” I assured him. “This one is more than enough, I have no intentions of getting any more.”

Then October 7th exploded, invading my life, turning my world inside out; altering life as I knew it. Nothing has been the same since then. More people than I can even count are gone. These were people whom I knew personally, including a very close friend. I almost lost six close family members, as well as my own life that day. Many of those kidnapped, some imprisoned in Gaza to this day, were former colleagues, students, parents of former students, neighbors, acquaintances from the local gym, people I know. People I knew.

Since October 8th, I have been a refugee in my own land. First my kibbutz and I were evacuated to Eilat. Most of us are now residing temporarily in Beer Sheva, where I wake up in a bed that is not mine, 20 stories higher than where I am used to living. Meeting up with people from my kibbutz takes more than just opening my front door, biking over to the kibbutz convenience store, having a cup of coffee with whomever happens to be at the community center or dining room. Preserving community has become a major challenge.

My young granddaughters can no longer surprise me at my doorstep. They are now a 35 minute drive away from me. I can no longer inhale the Nirim air when I wake up to walk around the perimeter fence. “Eau de Nirim,” which is a combination of freshly mowed grass, plowed earth and cow manure mixed with milk, has been replaced with windowless hallways, stuffy temperamental elevators and noxious bus fumes. Instead of hearing morning-bird songs and, yes, occasional distant explosions, I hear building cranes and ambulance sirens.

Living 20 floors above what I am used to

The bottom line is: there is very little we really have control of in our lives. Since there is no avoiding that date, which has now been forever etched on my heart, my mind and my soul, I decided to own it by having it etched in my skin.

At first I thought of just tattooing the numbers on my wrist, reminiscent of those that were seared into the arms of Auschwitz survivors, since I totally felt like I had survived an attempted genocide that day. It would be an angry, in-your-face statement, marking the date when the most Jews have been slaughtered in a single day since the Holocaust.

However, my daughter convinced me that putting such a reminder on my body would be permanently dispiriting. There is no way for me to make the significance of that date disappear. We are all frozen there, all of us whose lives were so drastically impacted. I was reminded of the way the godmother fairies in “Sleeping Beauty” could not rescind the curse which the evil witch had put on Aurora, but they were able to lighten the sentence, sweeten her fate. In the same vein, I decided to find a way to germinate hope and rebirth from those ill-fated digits, making something positive grow and be rebuilt from that day when so much was stolen from me, personally, and from all of us who live on my kibbutz and were present in my region on that Saturday morning 41 weeks ago.

Healing Ink helped me make that happen. Talented, famous tattoo artists were brought over from the United States, as well as from Israel, for the event. Over the span of three days, in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 75 artists volunteered their talents to gift 129 survivors of the October 7th massacres with permanent body art that would help them process their experiences and become part of their long journey of healing.

When you live through an existential threat, such as that which we did on October 7th, you speak a different language. You look at each other and know. There are codes which you understand that others do not. Hopefully, they never will. For this reason, it was all the more meaningful to me to have someone who spoke my “language as a survivor” create my tool for healing. My designated artist is, herself, a survivor of that massacre. The fact that it was done at the Healing Ink event, where I was surrounded by other survivors, made it all the more meaningful.

Since I had had the honor of having met many of them a few days earlier, when I spoke to them about October 7th and took them on a tour of my kibbutz, I felt I was among friends. The tour helped opened a window for them onto our experiences a little more profoundly, enabling them understand more about the people whom they were about to ink.

I am deeply grateful to all those at Healing Ink for letting me take part in this meaningful event. Thank you Craig, for bringing Healing Ink to us, again. Thank you Debby and Ben and all the others who dealt with the complicated logistics of it all. Thank you to the social workers who were there for us (Maya, for example, who was on the spot, at the right moment to help me through my tears.) To the talented artists, each and every one, who contributed their talents and their hearts, to help us start healing. Thank you to my dear tattoo artist, Yasmin, who once again skillfully, sensitively, made my vision into body art that will accompany me for the rest of my life. Hopefully, for the last time.

Yasmin IG: @adom_tattoo

When soldiers perform bravely in the line of duty, they are honored with a medal. Civilians do not get medals of honor, but we sure do deserve them. Each and every one of us.

My first tattoo was a talisman. This tattoo is my badge of honor.

My Badge of Honor: making beauty and regrowth bloom from the date.

(If you are interested, you can read about my first experience with Healing Ink on ToI – “Scars Visibilized”)