Ask Ishmael: Tattoos

Q: Dear Ishmael: Tattoos are very hip. Do you have any tattoos? What do you think about them in general?

A: What a great question. Let me tell you a little story. My good friend Queequeg recently had a bout with very serious illness. He was so sure he was going to die that he had the carpenter build a coffin for him. But then, just as soon as they made sure the coffin was a good fit and all, up he jumps, good as new! Anyway, with a wild whimsiness (my favorite kind of whimsiness of course) he uses that coffin as a sea-chest, and lately he’s been carving “all manner of grotesque figures and drawings on it” to match the tattoos he has all over his body. He’s a Pacific Islander, you see, so he’s got the traditional hand-tapped full-body number. They’re gorgeous.

Anyway, these tattoos were done by this prophet on his native island, who “had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth.” But it’s an unreadable treatise, a riddle—“ a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even Queequeg himself could not read, though his own live heart beat against them.” It’s too bad, really, that “these mysteries [are] therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last” [1].

I mean, call me a transcendental-existentialist agnostic or what you will, the fact is that Queequeg’s tattoos are only tattoos. The true, absolute meaning behind them is unreadable; there are no Platonic forms lying beneath the world’s hieroglyphics. The material of this world can’t tell us anything useful about what’s beyond.

And that’s why I have tattooed on my right arm the dimensions of a whale skeleton I once saw in the Solomon Islands. The only reason I had them tattooed there was because I needed to remember them for my book, and there was no other way to write them down. And actually, I had to round them off to the nearest foot, because “I wished the other parts of my body to remain a blank page for a poem I was then composing” [2]. You just gotta do what you can where you are with what you got, y’know what I’m saying?

[1] Melville 421

[2] Melville 397