The first boy I ever kissed was an aspiring tattoo artist; we rode the bus to and from middle school together and, for the duration of our brief whatever, a month or so in February of seventh grade, would huddle up in a single seat for the journey, his arm wrapped entirely around me, sealing me against his side, while he told me about outfits he wanted me to wear and the tattoos he wanted to someday ink me with. Now it seems obviously creepy and controlling but it was enthralling, then: no one had ever noticed me like that before, or traced fantastic outlines on my bared forearms, almost reverent when he touched me.

It is true that I have the skin for it: extra pale, a bright, sometimes fishbelly white, that sick translucent almost-green in the wrong light. It is easy to make me blush or bruise, and to be honest I often feel exposed by it, the pores and veins so clearly visible, my anatomy diagrammed instead of concealed or protected. What I do not have are scars; or, rather, I have one, a wide arc over the top of my right forefinger’s lowest knuckle. I got it from a wineglass, washing dishes on an otherwise unimportant night in a very dramatic summer. I am thin-skinned enough to have been marked by the stitches as well as the scar.

I don’t remember when I started wanting a tattoo but I remember when I decided what it would be: nearly seventeen, after a stupid, drunk New Years’ eve, I thought that kavanah, Hebrew for “intention,” inked where I could see it, would be a good way to remember to stay out of trouble. My father has two tattoos that he got while drunk, one on each bicep; I guess I thought it was the better part of wisdom to get one to remind me not to drink in the first place.

That isn’t why I got it, almost exactly six years later, but I hate talking about what it means because the word means and the concepts related are and I have been thinking about it for a while now and it means a lot of things. (More on that here). What means more right now is that I did it at all: I offered up my forearm to a man I didn’t know and asked him to inscribe something there.

I was just about to come to the end of a truly awful non-relationship with this boy that I had been intensely in love with, the kind of obsessive, grasping love that kept me in thrall to it, sleeping and eating less than now seems possible, as if my own manic focus could keep us from falling apart. I lived in the electric hum of my own anxiety; in all my years of yoga, never has the body been so nearly transcended. By the time I got back to school at the end of winter break he’d decided to leave me; he has seen the tattoo, since, but we have never discussed it. I didn’t know when I got it that the tattoo would mark my body as once again separate from his, but I don’t mind that, anymore: it is part but not nearly all of the offering I made when I got it done.

I am generally small, fine featured and fresh faced: in jeans and sneakers, you might generously guess me eighteen. I have spent most of my life ruthlessly indifferent to my body; I rarely recognize myself in the mirror, the refined self-image I cultivate marred by frizzed out curls and the sheen of my nervous forehead. To dictate what part of me was going to look like, to say that it was mine to decide, mine to make do with: that is what matters about what I did. The break up brought it into sharp relief but I would have found out anyway, one way or another: it’s one part youthful indiscretion but also what being a grown up means, making decisions you might regret later because what other option is there. I wanted what I wanted, and I got it; now I keep it with me, inked on my skin. It reminds me of the past; in some ways, it feels like the door the got closed. The scar reminds me of the wound but it also means that the healing is done.

I’m going to get another one, eventually; I think I know what it is but I’m not sure. I want something in color, this time, and I still hear Max urging me on that path: it would look so good on you, he said, just about a decade ago. You would look amazing. You with tattoos would be so perfect.