The first tattoo I got, freshly eighteen in my first year of college, is set to be the first of a whole sleeve, directly inspired by my all time favorite trilogy of books. The Southern Reach Trilogy, written by Jeff VanderMeer, consisting of Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, with a fourth book—Absolution—coming out October 22nd of this year. It’s a weird piece, because nothing inspired by these books could be anything but weird; it’s about the size of my phone, starting on a little below my right wrist and going up towards the bend of my elbow; the top half (from elbow bend to mid forearm) is a lighthouse, the beacon shining out towards the eye; the bottom half (from mid forearm to below the wrist) is a staircase, winding towards a point that will never be resolved. The whole thing has this scratchy, sketchy style, courtesy of Marissa Larkin (@larkinthepark_tats on Instagram), and I love it to pieces.
I’ve always wanted tattoos. Both my parents have them, and the deal my mom and I had worked out in high school dictated that she would pay for my first tattoo, as long as she came with me. They’ve always appealed to me: the idea of using the body I have as a canvas, as a medium to memorialize things I’ve loved and things that have mattered to me and things that have changed me has always struck a chord with me, especially as someone who has had a tenuous relationship with their own body. The idea of a body being Home never really landed as I grew up. Some people are born into bodies that work with them, that they love from the word “go.” I’m not one of them. It was a House, it was a thing that held me together and let me do things I actually liked. Tattoos are how I mold my body into a thing I love. Even though they f*cking hurt. Like a lot.
Annihilation, first book of the Southern Reach Trilogy, was published on February 4th of 2014. It follows a team of scientists as they enter Area X, a landscape changed by forces unknown from a forgotten stretch of the American Southeast’s coastline into a lush, vibrant, mutating place, a place that rejects observation and laughs at understanding. The book is told in first person, through the journal of our narrator: the Biologist. She is never named. She’s a unreliable narrator trying desperately to convince us, the reader, that she’s not one. That she’s objective, that she’s right, that she can be trusted. That’s where the horror of this book lies for me; monsters and body horror aside, the true terror of this book is the slow death spiral the Biologist takes you through, the death throes of a scientist scrawled out in dense prose and sprawling rants. Her ending words still bounce around my head to this day:
“This part I will do alone, leaving you behind. Don’t follow. I’m well beyond you now, and traveling very fast.”
The book has two main set pieces: a lighthouse, ruined on the coastline, and a tower, absent on maps, descending into the deep. Neither of these places hold any solutions to Area X. Both of them are where some of my favorite scenes take place. Whenever I think about this book I come back to those images. A lighthouse, a structure designed to warn ships of rocky shores. A tower—the rest of the cast does not call it a Tower, they call it a tunnel—inverted, plunging into the Earth. What else could my first tattoo have been? A reminder of rocky shores; a site of vast unknowns. The tattoo took me about 2 and a half hours to get done, all in one sitting, and it’s healed very well, and I’m more happy with it than I can really articulate.
The lighthouse/tower isn’t the only tattoo I have: there’s a birdhouse on my left wrist with a light bulb inside (an homage to a song I grew up with, about as abstract as the song itself); I have a bumblebee right below that in memory of my Grandma Bee; there’s a mushroom shelf on the back of my left shoulder. I have another tattoo on my right side, too, first part of a piece for the second book—a hare with a rabbit’s eye, wrapping around part my bicep, it’ll eventually have a continuation in a rabbit with a hare’s eye, jumping behind it. My whole right arm/shoulder/chest is going to be for these books. Something on my upper arm for the third, something on my shoulder for the eventual fourth, countless smaller pieces and bits of these books in between, connective tissue of the whole sleeve. These will take time, I know, and they’ll take so much money, but I’m beyond excited to see them all come to fruition.
It’s hard to cleanly articulate why I love these books. They can be hard to parse, hard to process, easy to bounce off of. They don’t provide many answers to the myriad questions they pose. I don’t even really know why they struck me so hard when they did: I don’t really want to interrogate that too deeply, though. These books have special places in my life—I’ve been annotating an edition that has all three books in one hard-backed tome, and am only just recently getting to the second book. VanderMeer’s writing has firmly and definitively influenced my own in all corners, from academic discussions to half-baked poems scribed in my notes app. There’s a corner of my heart as lush and wild as Area X, and I try my best to nurture it. These books are about change, about adapting in the face of the un-understandable. They’re about what you can do when the world comes crashing down around you, about how you can determine the real from the manufactured. They’re about being you, even when the world finds you unsatisfactory, and god above do I resonate with that. When the world asks you what you are, all you can say is the truth, and sometimes that truth is simple: Who Knows?
—With Love, Rowan (They/Them)
