Sacred Ink

Lauren Winner, one of the best current thinkers on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, wrote a provocative book a few years back entitled Girl Meets God. In this memoir, Winner includes a reflection on her four tattoos: “a teal crescent moon on my ankle, a band of autumnal leaves braceleting around my left arm, a purple flower embedded in a purple star just over my left breast, and a small wreath of laurel leaves…”(152).

A glutton for all things history, Winner also notes:

There is a long tradition of Christian tattooing. Procopius of Gaza, a historian who lived in the late fifth century, noted that many Christians in Europe wore tattoos of the sign of the Cross on their arms. In the sixteenth century, pilgrims to the shrine of Loreto in Italy got tattoos, often of the Virgin Mary or St. Francis, to commemorate their trip. Around the same time, European visitors to Palestine came home with tattoos of the Jerusalem cross. George Sandys, an Englishman traveling in Europe in the second decade of the seventeenth century, observed, “They…mark the Arms of Pilgrims, with the names of Jesus, Maria, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the Jerusalem cross, and sundry other characters.” Christians not only associated tattoos with Christ’s stigmata, but with two verses in the New Testament—Paul’s words in Galatians 6 about carrying “the marks of Jesus tattooed on my body,” and the prophetic vision in Revelation 19 about the writing on Christ’s thigh (154).

To read about women and men from the church I serve who are living with missional purpose in the Metro Detroit area, read this.