Tattoos
This is a story of tattoos in my family.
It was Father’s Day in 2013. I had a surprise gift from two of my adult kids. When I say two, you may wonder how many kids I have. I have four in all, whom I am deeply proud of. They are beautiful adults and beloved souls.
All four celebrated Father's Day at my home with their partners.
Here’s an image of that surprise eight years ago.
You may wonder about the significance of these two tattoos, seemingly unrelated. No, they are related.
The top arm belongs to my 2nd daughter, and the bottom arm belongs to my youngest. The tattoo lettering is my family name Jayasinghe in Sinhala and English. The script ජයසිංහ is in my first language in Sri Lanka, the country where I was raised. The bottom lettering, Jayasinghe, is in English. Both are in my handwriting.
What a way to show gratitude! My handwriting is permanently inked into their arms.
I feel stoked to be privileged to be their dad. Immensely grateful for the appreciation of my mark on them.
A few years after this great event, I considered doing something similar in my left arm to celebrate my four children, who nourished me with their thoughtful actions and words.
I made several design mockups, picking my four children’s handwriting names. Unfortunately, tattooing four names on the mid-lower arm is impossible. Abbreviating their names, I tried to shorten them to a few letters. Despite repeated efforts of creative combinations, I could not simply come up with a design pattern that made sense to my four children.
In 2018, five years had elapsed since that Father’s Day in 2013. I had not given up on the idea of my tattoo celebrating my family.
My son and his wife were expecting their first child, my first grandchild. So it was a significant milestone for me to see the third generation of Jayasinghes in this blessed country, Australia, which we call home.
In the meantime, I was in deep thought. If I was a good father to my four children, it was my father, Thomas Jayasinghe, who brought me up to be a good father one day. I am a product of his and my mother’s upbringing to be who I was and am now. I wanted to tattoo their handwriting on my arms.
Then I dug through my family archives to find the handwriting of our family name, Jayasinghe. I was also searching, looking for my mother’s maiden name Jayawardane. I wanted both family names in my original language, Sinhala. Finding a gold nugget in my father’s records did not take long. It was from my first ever job application when I was a seventeen-year-old, completed by him in Sinhala. The story of my first job application and interview is a separate story that you could read another time.
I looked further for my mother’s family name Jayawardane in the archives. I wanted to tattoo her handwriting on my other arm. But unfortunately, I could not find a record good enough to be reproduced by a tattoo artist.
On the day my first grandchild was born, I celebrated that significant family milestone by visiting a prominent tattoo artist in Surry Hills and getting my left arm tattooed with ජයසිංහ, my father’s handwriting. So, as my first grandchild came into this world, her grandfather was permanently etched with her great-grandfather’s handwriting.
Now I have completed the cycle of tattoos in my family. I have my father’s handwriting on my left arm. Two of my kids have my handwriting on their left arms.
I am still looking for family records to reconstruct my mother’s handwriting so I can get it tattooed on my right arm. But I have not given up.
I often wish my father, Thomas, had seen his handwriting as a tattoo on my left arm when he was alive. He would have been immensely proud of what he had achieved through his son.
I await the day I can explain the meaning and significance of my tattoo to my grandchildren when they are old enough.
Subscribe to my stories https://djayasi.medium.com/subscribe
Images belong to the original copyright owners.
