Paint yourself city

National Geographic's kids magazine World (rip) had this awesome feature on its back cover, where readers were asked to match odd, up-close images to their source. I honestly don't remember anything else about the magazine, but puzzled over these photos every month.

So I've loved features like this, where Daily News readers were asked to match a tattoo to the face of its host:

At one point, I mused extensively on the idea of keeping a bodily record of my cities. The idea was, I wouldn't lose the life lessons I'd been taught if I could write their sites on my skin. A tradition older than Proverbs 3:3, whose

Do not let kindness and truth leave you; Bind them around your neck, Write them on the tablet of your heart
...has only ever appeared to me as tangible as real people in real places offering themselves as gateways to kindness and truth, even if through suffering.

For me, places are about 70% emotional aftertaste of hard lessons learned. Only 30% is the place of This Moment, whatever external and internal conditions frame a given day's ways of seeing. I'm working on it, but even today I can't bike over the Williamsburg Bridge without the pedals spinning me back to harsh winters where this was my bridge between haunted home and harrowing day. Of course it was true year-round during that phase of struggle, but the messenger bag never felt heavier than when I pedaled into the biting eastbound wind during fierce cold mornings. And so it was that I thought the shape of her industrial majesty would be an appropriate topic for the long flat of my back.

 (Source: Daily News)

But one immediate obstacle was that the striking visual of perpetually changing "bridge art," let's call it, would go missing from the tattoo. In fact, the whimsical to angry displays other artists exhibited there also made my map. Because I wasn't alone on a merely technical conveyor between points A and B, the art of others was an invitation to just keep going, if only to see what got painted or pasted overnight on this or that stanchion up ahead. And the performance artists, too, most especially the orthodox ladies with their matching dresses, wigs, strollers, were part of my picture. My skin is thick and pliable, but it definitely couldn't contain all of this. Even if I could get some of these elements in a design, it would still be too one-dimensional, a graven image rendered by the hand of a single artist instead of the hands and feet and voices of the many who'd qualified it so singularly.

(Williamsburg Bridge upper deck--the only view I'd ever had! Source: JacobDaJew)

(Among the most prestigious revolving canvasses. Source: Google Images)

(Street Artist Judith Supine's "Above the City in a Summer Night Dream." Source: Gradient Magazine)

But honestly, and all poetry in motion aside, the more practical impediment was the canvas itself--my skin's own system of lines and cracks for record-keeping. Painting over it might just betray all the wisdom I intended to represent with the tattoo. And so unless I could work up a design that would grow (shrink? sag? dry and crack?) with me--which could actually work with a bridge tattoo, come to think of it--the surface of all this place-keeping would undermine my artistic intent with its own. So I scrapped the tattoo idea and yielded to my inner artist, trusting she'll speak of the depths and heights in skin and other media as dynamic as the places that summon her.