More Than Ink

Dear Diary,

I recently had a conversation with my friend about my tattoos. To know me is to know that I have my fair share of ink artwork and have had a number of piercings. Her first question, like most people’s, was, “Was it not painful?”

I answered the way I always do: “It was, but I guess I have a high pain tolerance and a complicated relationship with pain.” I then added something I’ve said many times before: “I’ve actually gotten multiple tattoos and piercings in one sitting.”

But this time, that statement lingered with me.

It brought back two distinct memories. The first was from two years ago, when I was getting my last three tattoos. The second was from a couple of weeks prior, when I took another friend to get her nose pierced.

In the first memory, I remember sitting in the tattoo shop, absolutely terrified of the pain I was about to experience as I got the new pieces I had desired for a while. It was the first time I had ever feared tattoo pain or wanted to shy away from it, but I still went through with it anyway.

In the second memory, my friend asked me to rate the pain of getting a nose piercing on a scale of one to ten. I told her I genuinely couldn’t because, on the day I got mine done, I had gotten two other piercings that were significantly more painful. In comparison, the nose piercing felt like a walk in the park.

As I reflected on both memories during my conversation with my friend, I unexpectedly said the quiet part out loud:

“Why was it that I desired to be in so much pain for a period of time?”

And for the first time, I asked myself another question that felt even heavier:

“What was I going through at the time that necessitated the desire for this much pain?”

Those two questions opened the door to a long-overdue conversation with the Holy Spirit.

In this diary entry, I want to share some of the revelations that came from that conversation. Not to generalize my experience or project it onto anyone else’s, but simply to offer a glimpse into what I now understand as my complicated relationship with my tattoos, my body, and pain itself.

Before you continue reading, I want to acknowledge that this entry contains mentions of non-suicidal self-injury, sexual abuse trauma, and complicated relationships with pain and the body. Please read gently and take whatever pauses you need. And if this feels too heavy for you right now, it’s okay to step away and come back another time.

People get tattoos for many different reasons. According to the Newport Editorial Team, “body art can tell a powerful story of our journey, giving others an intimate and genuine glimpse into who we are, what we love, and where we’ve come from.”

At first glance, my tattoos would probably tell you that I’m a follower of Christ who deeply loves where she comes from. I have seven tattoos in total: five are scripture-based, and two represent the country and continent where I was born and raised.

I genuinely love my tattoos because they have been an outward expression of what matters deeply to me. Like many people with tattoos, my body art tells a story; stories of healing, resilience, faith, identity, and remembrance. Pew Research Center found that 69 percent of people with tattoos have at least one tattoo that honors or remembers someone or something significant. Whether it is connected to joy, grief, survival, or transformation, body art often becomes a way for people to carry pivotal moments of their lives with them. Memorial tattoos, for example, can play a meaningful role in the grieving process.

For a long time, I only understood my tattoos through the lens of expression. I saw them as art, testimony, memory, and identity. And they were all of those things. But healing has a way of revisiting old decisions and asking deeper questions about what was happening beneath the surface when those decisions were made.

Sometimes what we call self-expression is also survival.

Sometimes the body is speaking long before we have language for our pain.

I’m sure many of us have heard the phrase, “your body keeps the score,” and mine has kept a number of scores.

My very first tattoo was inked in 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. While the world was trying to figure out how to survive a new normal, I had also come to a new realization about the sexual abuse trauma I had endured as a teenager.

In that season of forced stillness, after years of dissociation, my mind and body were finally ready to begin healing, and everything came flooding back.

And in that moment, I did what some survivors of sexual assault sometimes do: I used body art as a form of non-traditional healing.

According to research surrounding trauma recovery and embodiment, tattoos can sometimes serve as a physical act of reclaiming the body, reminding survivors that what happened to them does not have to define their relationship with themselves forever. For some, the act of choosing what happens to their body after trauma can become deeply significant.

And if I’m honest, that was my intention when I sat in the tattoo artist’s chair.

My first tattoo was Psalm 46:5: “God is within her, she will not fall; God will help her at the break of day,” with an anchor beside it to remind me where my soul needed to remain anchored.

To this day, it remains my most painful tattoo and also my most hidden one.

Looking back now, I think that is fitting.

It symbolized the hidden pain I had carried for years, pain that silently lived in my body long before I had words for it. But it also became a reminder that even in my suffering, I was never alone. God had always been present, even in the parts of my story I tried hardest to bury.

This realization led me to begin researching the relationship between tattoos, trauma, and mental health because I wanted to understand why pain had felt so comforting to me for such a long time.

What I discovered was both difficult and freeing to confront.

In conversations surrounding mental health, tattoos can sometimes exist in a complicated space. While body art is often a beautiful form of self-expression, identity, storytelling, or cultural connection, some research also explores the ways tattoos and piercings can overlap with unresolved trauma, emotional distress, and non-suicidal self-injury behaviors for certain individuals.

Of course, tattoos are not inherently self-harm, and I want to be careful not to project my personal experience onto others. People get tattoos for countless healthy and meaningful reasons. But in my own story, I had to confront the reality that some of my relationship with tattoos was tied to my relationship with pain.

Non-suicidal self-injury is often described as the intentional infliction of pain as a way to cope with overwhelming emotional distress, regain a sense of control, or temporarily quiet internal pain. As I continued researching, I found studies discussing how some individuals intentionally seek out painful body modifications during seasons of emotional turmoil because physical pain can sometimes feel easier to process than emotional pain.

That realization forced me to sit with an uncomfortable truth:

Some of my tattoos were not only expressions of art or meaning. Some of them were also expressions of grief, trauma, emotional overwhelm, and a body desperately trying to process emotions it did not yet know how to carry.

And if I’m being completely honest, some of the tattoos I got after my first one were done with the intention of feeling pain. I intentionally chose body sites known to be more painful because some part of me wanted, desired, and even needed to feel it.

At the time, I had just begun confronting years of buried sexual abuse trauma without the support of a mental health professional. My body had finally stopped dissociating, but I had not yet learned how to emotionally process everything that was resurfacing.

So the weight of it remained.

No matter how much time passed, it continued magnifying beneath the surface. And as the emotional distress deepened, the tattoos increased too.

Looking back now, I do not think I was simply chasing tattoos.

I think I was trying to survive feelings I did not yet have the tools, language, or support to navigate.

It wasn’t until the end of 2023, when I finally began addressing these wounds in therapy, that I started understanding how deeply connected my body, my trauma, and my relationship with pain truly were.

By the time I finally brought all of this into therapy, I had already been seeing my therapist on and off for about two years. But this time was different. I had originally gone back for an entirely separate reason while also actively rebuilding my relationship with God.

At the core of that rebuilding was one question I could not stop asking:

If God was truly a good Father, why would He allow something like this to happen to me when I was so defenseless?

At the time, my therapist was the only person I trusted enough to carry this information gently, so for the first time, I finally brought the abuse into the room.

And over multiple sessions, we unpacked it all.

The grief. The anger. The bitterness. The sadness.

The disappointment toward God, toward myself, toward the person who hurt me, and even toward my family. Although I had never shared what happened, some part of me still wished someone had noticed I was silently struggling.

Session after session, I cried through memories I had spent years trying to outrun.

But slowly, something began to change.

Its weight started to feel lighter, not because it stopped hurting, but because I finally stopped avoiding it. For years, I had tried to go around it, suppress it, intellectualize it, spiritualize it, and bury it inside my body. But healing required me to face it honestly and move through it with God so that it no longer had ownership over me.

And that journey toward healing was not easy.

Forgiveness did not come quickly, and understanding did not come quickly either.

But over time, I began learning that although what happened to me deeply grieved the heart of God, it was never His intention for my life. We live in a fallen world where people misuse free will and wound one another deeply. Yet even within that reality, God’s mercy ensured that my trauma would never have the final say over my life.

What the enemy meant for evil, God has continually transformed into something meaningful, healing, and redemptive.

So years later, when God began revealing to me that part of my calling is to be a healer of hearts, it no longer surprised me. Because I know what it feels like to carry a wounded heart. And I know what it feels like to watch God slowly restore one, too.

In many ways, everything came full circle at the end of 2024 when I sat in a tattoo artist’s chair again, preparing for new ink, and found myself terrified of the pain I once craved.

At the time, I could not fully explain why.

But looking back now, I think that fear was evidence of healing.

For the first time in years, pain no longer felt comforting to me.

And maybe that is because I had finally received the healing I so desperately deserved.

Since then, I haven’t gotten any new tattoos, although I do plan on getting one more at the end of this year. This time, not from a place of survival, but to memorialize someone who embodied resilience in a deeply powerful way.

I don’t know whether I’ll continue getting tattoos after that.

But what I do know is this:

I will continue asking myself the deeper questions.

I will continue paying attention to what my body, mind, and spirit are trying to say.

And most importantly, I will continue bringing my pain to the only One who has ever truly been able to heal me.

From my heart to yours,

Love Nandi.