Tell me about your food tattoos and I'll tell you who you are

Weighing in on the conversation ignited by a recent Vittles article, this is reflection on my own food tattoos.

Recently someone said that you can tell how someone is in bed by the way they eat. Despite my cynicism, I’ve been ever so slightly more self-aware at mealtimes since: to be ravenous and messy, or tidy and elegant? Like a barometer determining the quality of both these bodily pleasures, contingency lies in the context.

Likewise, you’ll get a different answer to the ‘meaning’ of either of my two tattoos – both of which are food themed – depending on who's asking and when. What level of fanciful to flippant am I feeling? Philosophical to crude? But either way, all roads do in fact lead back to sex. Whether food is a kind of sex oracle or not, its physicality is visceral and sensual as well as deeply personal. Through either its consumption or denial, our bodies are literally shaped by food, so why not hit the hammer on the head by decorating myself with the sexiest of its kind?

Travelling by myself after I left university, I felt the first pang of desire to ink the sense of significance I was experiencing onto my body. I ate my way through the cities of Japan and the backstreets of India, proudly gorging myself with new experiences for my own pleasure alone. But all options for tattoos seemed silly and trite, and the thought of physically going into the parlour made me feel more lonely than brave: precisely the opposite of what I was craving to convey. But nonetheless, the seed was planted.

Fast forward a year, my then sixteen year old brother ordered a ‘stick and poke’ kit online and ‘offered’ to trial his new artistic pursuit on my flesh. I hastily agreed and within minutes he had inked the word ‘FIG’ on the left hand side of my chest. I could tell you about its links to the cautionary tale Sylvia Plath writes of in the Bell Jar, where her life stretches out in front of her like a fig tree. Her fear of making the wrong decision prevents her from making any, so that all figs – once delicious and ripe – wither and die in front her. I could also reel off passages in feminist literature where vaginas are described furtively and provocatively as split figs. 

This is all meaningful to me, but honestly and truly I chose it because it demanded very little skill. Its three simple letters felt safe under the circumstances. And, I do love figs – although arguably it’s set in motion a lifetime commitment to the sweet fruit with a slightly over egged zeal than perhaps otherwise called for. I am now the recipient of fig themed cards, sculptures, cakes – the list goes on, as it turns out. The humour is then not lost on me that over the years the ink has smudged slightly so that it reads more as ‘PIG’. I play a game with the children I look after where they swish from side to side quickly to determine whether that day it looks more pig or fig like. I relish both options, and have indeed become a proud ‘pig for figs’.

I still feel a degree of joyful surprise when I catch it in the mirror, or a new partner discovers it. It makes me smile but most of all, it makes me think of my brother Jude. As the years have gone by this reminder has accrued new meaning. Jude has also grown to find that cooking is a kind of anxiety quelling balm, and I love to stir and chop and bake alongside him. We often start our phone calls gently, by asking the comforting question: ‘what have you been cooking?’ The listing of dishes and ingredients is a balm like no other. 

The fig has more recently been joined with its euphemistic cousin, the oyster. Last summer, I visited my friend in New Orleans before we met another friend for a Texas road trip in a hilariously new-age van. On a particularly hot and humid day, we popped into a tattoo and piercing shop to buy a replacement earring. The shop was colourful and cheery, and its artist Jacci Gresham turned out to be the first black female tattoo shop owner in the US. Before we knew it, Agnes and I had embarked on matching tattoos. We googled ‘abstract, line drawing, oyster’, and hey presto that’s what we got. 

Its abstract design means that it is often mistaken for a vulva or, devastatingly, an avocado…At this point, I’m embracing the world of smutty, ambiguous tattoos full-heartedly. Ironically, I never ate any oysters in NOLA, despite their abundance. But the oyster is a nod to my interests in food writing and art, to issues around regenerative farming, and what it means to be a hungry woman, wanton and wanting more. It's a heady mix of contradictions: decadent, silly, luxurious, squeamish, slimy, refined and wonderfully flamboyant. It’s ramped the perception game I play with the children up a notch too. And as it turns out, I admittedly get a small kick from their parents’ polite confusion (and my parents’ less polite confusion) that I have seemingly turned my body into a curation of vulvas. It doesn’t even matter that my friend changed her tattoo design whilst I was midway through getting mine. She was also a lot firmer in curbing the frustrated tattooist’s insistence on shading. But delightfully, they match…enough.