In Defense of My Emu Tattoo

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/style/modern-love-in-defense-of-my-emu-tattoo.html

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Getting a tattoo during a first date is a risky move.

Afterward, my mother said to me, “How drunk were you?” The best friend of the person I was out with (it wasn’t an official date) said to her, “He’s in love with you.” And the mutual friend who had introduced us said to me, “Did you guys sleep together?”

Eight years earlier, when I was a freshman in college, I considered getting the word “laugh,” in Gaelic, tattooed on my body. I chose “laugh” because I was 19 and didn’t think anyone should take life too seriously. I chose Gaelic because I am of Irish descent and was grasping for some sort of cultural identity.

Fortunately, I was still scared of what my parents thought and never mustered the energy to even find out what “laugh” looks like in Gaelic. But I still wanted a tattoo.

Humor has been my go-to coping mechanism since practically before I could cut my own food. It got my parents’ attention, helped me make friends, defined my exterior personality and gave me a kind of superpower, allowing me to fake an extroverted existence. My high school yearbook is filled with “OMG you’re so funny” and “I will miss all your hilarious comments.”

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Humor was the only way I knew how to make myself feel appreciated. That’s what happens when you’re too scared to be yourself. I only talk to two of my high school friends now.

When I was 21, I studied in Sydney, Australia, for a semester, where the whole experience felt like an extension of the extroverted version of myself that I had mastered. It was a sprint along a path that wasn’t really mine, filled with adventure seeking, bar hopping, beach time, writing a deeply offensive short story in my creative writing class for the sake of laughter and shock (masking any real thoughts or feelings). On that same sprint, I jumped headfirst into a relationship, my first, as the wrong version of me.

Then, in the midst of my act, I stumbled into a moment where I didn’t have to pretend. It was at a wildlife sanctuary, of all places. While everyone else was gawking at kangaroos and koalas, I was staring at a caged bird, an emu. It stared at me with its big eyes. And kept staring. I stared back. For a long time. In silence. I could not relieve the silence with a joke or a selfie and felt no need to. I felt clarity for the first time in maybe forever. But I did not know how to make it last.

Three years later (two years too late), the girlfriend I met in Australia and I broke up. The ghost of a broken heart wove in and out of my life for a year, teasing me at bars when I had no one to buy a drink for and no one to walk home with, lingering in my phone as I searched my contacts for someone to share my good and bad news with, staring at me in restaurants from the empty seat across the table.

Until, slowly, the pain started to fade, and I realized that my broken heart was not actually mine but belonged to the person I had tried to convince myself I was. So I mourned the loss of my false self and celebrated the possibility of a new beginning. I went on new adventures: going to the movies by myself, walking around the city at night, unconcerned with having any social plans. Sitting in cafes alone and reading. The old me, the brokenhearted me, could not tag along as I leaned into the person she never wanted: my introverted and sensitive self.

And then I began yearning for a tattoo again, but it was not this realization of a new beginning or my ability to find the light at the end of the heartbreak tunnel, that I wanted to immortalize on my body. So I continued to wait until I knew which version of myself was worth remembering.

On my 26th birthday, I found myself alone at a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It was a special moment because I felt I deserved 20 or so minutes to myself, sipping a beer and observing the crowd without having to engage in pleasantries.

I did not start the evening alone, nor did I end it that way. A friend from preschool had come into the city for the night. Two high school friends joined. And others from college and adulthood surrounded me. The love shown by friends is not, from my experience, the suffocating kind. It exists like a weightless hug. But I am not a hugger by nature, so I had to sneak out to a nearby bar to steal some time alone.

As I sat by myself, I ignored my friends’ texts and calls. I just needed a moment to re-energize. Was I being rude? Probably. But it was my birthday and I did not owe anything to anyone. I was learning the delicate balance of setting boundaries.

And then I learned what kind of company matters.

It went something like this. A few months later, I was at a bar in Harlem drinking margaritas with a few friends, including her, a person I knew only through someone else. Just her presence made something click.

“I want a tattoo,” I said. I wanted more than a tattoo. I wanted connection.

“No, you don’t,” our mutual friend said. “You’re just bored.”

I regretted saying anything.

“Of what?” she said.

I told her the story of the caged emu. How dumb but beautiful they look. How I had yet to find the calmness I found that day on the other side of the world. I made jokes, trying to lighten the moment, but mostly I was scared that my random thoughts would not be received as I intended them. I actually didn’t know how I intended them; I just wanted someone to understand. A person, unlike an emu, who could speak back to me. And then she did.

“That story actually wasn’t as stupid as I expected it to be,” she said, smiling from across the table. “I say go for it.”

With that, something shifted at the table, in the air, in the city.

By the end of the night, I found myself on the subway with her and then, later, at another bar. In between, we sat on a stoop in the West Village as I drew a sketch of an emu. Once, twice, then seven times, until she bluntly said that she couldn’t let me put any of my own drawings on my body.

Still riding the wave of this strange, bold feeling, I walked with her to a tattoo shop — the first one we found open — and had them pull up a photo of an emu on Google images.

“That one,” I said to the guy. “But make it cartoonish.”

I was surprised by how calmly I said it. He had no questions.

She and I waited as he went downstairs and drew up what I thought would be a terrible picture I would never want to have on my body forever. He would reappear with his bad drawing, we would laugh, I would back out and we would part ways, letting this be yet another late-night story of what might have been.

“Wow, that’s actually really good,” she said when he returned with his drawing. And soon I was sitting on a chair in a downtown basement, letting a stranger draw a bird on my arm in permanent ink.

Afterward, sitting with her at the bar, I felt full clarity for only the second time ever. This person stared at me as we talked; she understood me. I stared back. No jokes, no need to disrupt the moment.

Two years later, I was staring at the emu on my arm and talking to her about that night as she sat next to me on the couch in the home we share.

“I still can’t believe I let you go through with that,” she said. “You looked so calm in the chair. I was freaking out on the inside.”

I was never freaking out. Not with her there. What started as a symbol of solitude that I found in the Australian desert is now a symbol of the best company and conversations I’ll ever have.

“I’m glad you did,” I said.

Jimmy Harney is a music publicist in New York City.

Modern Love can be reached at modernlove@nytimes.com.

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