I Got My Incarcerated Father's Face Tattoo to Honor Him

Why I Got My Father's Face Tattoo

My father when he died, he was actually incarcerated.

That is the sentence people stop on, and I understand why, because it sounds like the end of a story about a man who was absent, but it isn't, it's the beginning of a story about what gets handed down and what gets dropped along the way.

And one of the realizations that I had when we went through that was that because my little sister is 15 years younger than me, she didn't get the same dad that I got because during her childhood, he was locked up most of the time and then he got out and died.

Fifteen years is not a small gap, and when you think about what that gap actually holds, it's a completely different father on either side of it.

I got the version of him who was around, who was teaching me things, who was showing me how a man carries himself even when he's getting it wrong. She got letters and phone calls and a short window at the end, and even though it was the same man, those turned into two entirely separate experiences of him.

That's what nobody really prepares you for when a parent dies young or spends years away. The loss isn't evenly distributed across the family. Somebody in the room got years you didn't get, and somebody in the room lost something you never had in the first place, and everyone is standing at the same funeral grieving completely different men.

And so earlier this year, my sister got married and I went out there for her wedding and I was the only Holyfield there, the only one representing that name in the whole building. That detail sat on me for a while before I understood what it was actually asking of me.

Because when you're the only one carrying a name into a room, you're not just a guest at that point. You are the whole side of the family. Whatever people think about where she comes from, they're going to think it based on how you walk in, how you speak, how you handle yourself for those few hours.

My big thing was like, I wanted to make sure that when I showed up for this wedding for my little sister, that like my name, my family got the proper representation and that I was able to show up there as the patriarch of my family and bring a positive light to it and give her that piece of my dad that I got that she didn't get.

That last part is the whole thing, giving her the piece of him I got.

I can't hand her fifteen years back, and nobody can, not me, not anybody. But I can be the person in the room who knew him, who carries some of how he moved and how he talked, so that on the biggest day of her life there was at least one person standing there who was a living piece of her father.

That's why I got the same tattoo on my face that he had.

People assume a face tattoo is rebellion, or that it's about looking hard, and I get why they land there because that's what the culture tells them a face tattoo means, but that wasn't it for me. It was a decision to carry him somewhere I could not hide him and could not take him off.

Grief usually goes the other direction, where you put the man in a box, you keep the good parts, and you quietly leave the incarcerated part out of the story when new people ask about your family, because that route is easier and it's the one most of us end up taking.

I didn't want that easier version sitting where the real man should be. I wanted the whole man on me, the parts that raised me and the parts that failed, because those came from the same person and you don't actually get to separate them.