The Anatomy of a Moth
Breaking through contemporary American death culture by way of tattoos, rituals, communal mourning, and the yucca moth of Joshua Tree.
The needle does not make quick work, but lingers under my breast, stutters down my sternum. A small blade scraping at my shell. The ink entering into another incision on my skin. The thin black line trails under my right breast, drawing the forewing in long outward strokes. Above me, fluorescent lights flicker almost unnoticeably.
I am lying on my back on the padded table, a gurney, in a sort of lover’s repose. I feel the needle stitching its way down my abdomen with a trickle of blood. A gloved hand wipes away crimson, leaving only the black ink embedded in the wound. The pressure of the needle focused so tightly into a single point. It is a scratching, a carving, a remembering. It is a cave painting.
In the hollow between my breasts, the tattooist is carving a yucca moth. The yucca moth I chose because I chose the desert, because I have made a home for myself near the Joshua trees, a home with the yucca moths, the only pollinator of the Joshua trees. I have committed to this mutual symbiosis of living and remembering. Of being so near death, and still so alive.
In the desert the yucca moth is cream white and pink. On my skin she is speckled gray and black, like charcoal from wildfires. Her eyes are small, her wings tapered and soft.
For as long as there has been pigment, there has been memorial.
Among many things, my grandmother was an artist. She illustrated anatomies of birds, portraits of primates, and the finely dusted wings of moths. After she died I saw their wings everywhere, haunting windowsills and lightbulbs. The moth seemed to have become the stand-in for everyone I have ever lost.
From the Greek, autopsy means “to see for oneself.” It is rumored the practice began with Caesar, his wounds examined by his doctor to find his cause of death, but autopsy continues in the West as a common post mortem practice. Even when we know the truth of the body, of what wounds made their way through the flesh, we must see for ourselves.
Using a long scalpel, the pathologist makes a Y incision, drawn downward from the shoulders, across the breast, in two lines angled toward the sternum, continuing from the abdomen and sloping in a straight line down toward the pubic bone. Next, bone shears cleave the ribcage, revealing the lungs and heart, before the mortician moves on to the lower cavities, emptying the shell. All organs removed, examined, measured for their qualities. It all reminds me of how hearts were once weighed against feathers. Against wings.
If my grandmother’s lungs had been removed before her cremation, what would they have looked like? My grandmother. I wonder if her organs were returned to her body, beneath the shield of her ribs, a baseball stitch to her torso rejoining her. Would they do this before she was burned? Does the crematorium incinerate a whole body, or only the remnants?
Contemporary American death culture seems drained of ritual. Unlike other societies, where grief is a pain communally shared and where religions or cultures offer guidance on how to mourn and on the transitions of loved ones in the midst of death, American culture values isolation in grief. We are left to transform alone, to carry the narrative of passing singly, an internal weight. The psychological transformation we undergo as bereavers in mourning is beyond language. We turn inward, away from each other, to remember. The separation of religion and medicine and community creates a void in which Americans create their own mourning rituals; among them, perhaps, are tattoos.
Among the first peoples who documented mourning on their bodies are the Māori of New Zealand. The Māori remember their dead through haehae. From roughly 1250 CE onward, Māori women carved lines into each other’s thighs and abdomens with sharpened shells. To preserve their lines, soot was pressed into the wounds. Whatever pigment remained, after the blood was wiped away, was memorial. These were among the first mourning tattoos.
The tattoo as ritual for the bereaved helps to articulate pain beyond the spiritual realm. It draws the pain outward, in lines, from the inner cavity of the mind, onto the physical being. It renders the flesh in storied pain. A mourning ritual constructs a narrative, one of loss, catharsis, and perhaps a reclamation. To tattoo in honor of the dead is one ritual we can continue to reclaim in the American mourning landscape.
A tattoo bridges the public and private spheres of mourning.
From the forewings through the thorax, the insect is tidily etched into my skin. Shades of black and gray ink span across my breastbone, in the cleft between. Antennae stretch outward in a V, above the set of wings. Layers of line work, shading, and dots create the anatomy of the moth.
When the tattooist leans into me, he rests the weight of his body on his palm, just above my hip. Am I a moth pinned beneath the glass? The tattoo gun twitches its way down my torso and it is agony, this steady opening, this shared pain with anyone who has ever been tattooed. Ink becoming a communal rite.
When the sting is too much I focus on his warmth, on the pressure above my hip. He reaches to smear away the ink that pools on my skin. As he pulls away, his left arm brushes my right nipple. The dizzying blur of pain and pleasure. I am vibrating beneath his gun.
I wonder what it would be like to be fucked here on the examination table, beneath the blinking lights. The needle presses deeper.
A woman holds my hand while the tattooist continues his work. I feel the pulse of her wrist with my thumb. I feel her quicken when he stands above me, studying his handiwork. I feel her heat.
Weeks later, when the tattoo is healed, the woman who held my hand traces the outline of the moth. She glides her hands upward in a V, across my chest, and down again. She joins her first two fingers together at the hindwings, and when she draws the line down from my abdomen, she doesn’t stop at the pubic bone. She brushes her fingertips against my clit to complete the Y.
When I look down at the dark ink of my body I think of the cavern that a ribcage makes, and how we paint the external walls of our caves in adornment, in memoriam. The moth is how I remember.
And when my body is opened, the first incisions will bisect the yucca moth. As my fascia opens, revealing the dark inside, my organs will be pulled outward through her thorax, rupturing the lines of her body.
My body will spread outward like wings and the dark ink will outlive me.
Read part two of this column, “Call It Holy” by Eileen Elizabeth, HERE
Eileen Elizabeth is a queer Appalachian essayist and poet living in Southern California. She is the co-founder of Boshemia Magazine, a UK/US feminist arts and culture magazine. She is a Nonfiction MFA candidate at University of California, Riverside.
