Saved in my phone from several years ago is a photo of an impressionistic pelican design, the strokes like calligraphy, thick and delicate. It’s more the idea of the pelican than the bird itself. I’ve been waiting for years to get into the tattoo parlor (I say the, but I must mean “a” since I don’t know where it will be) and show someone this picture and ask them to ink it into my skin.
I never thought of myself as a person with tattoos, until I had one. My person and I inked our vows into our skin on our honeymoon in a tattoo parlor across from a Catholic Church. I’ve been wearing the promise for seven years, almost, and when I look down at the word— “okay” —I feel it speak back from within me. I look at his hand, and I feel it echo there, too.
There are Brown Pelicans on the Gulf of Mexico, several hours from where I live. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to watch them move in front of me, diving with beaks wide, scooping fish, taking flight with their unwieldy bodies. In my bird guides I stop on the pictures of these birds, both the illustrated Sibley and the snapshots of the Texas Bird Guide. I am arrested by their strangeness, their webbed feet and long wings, how they seem to be right on the edge of the fantastic, a creature beautiful because of its unlikeliness. I scroll back to the picture in my phone, tall, beak tucked into the chest, waiting to alight on my arm. What is it about this improbable bird?
An older image floats past my eyes: the pelican, a depiction of Jesus. But not just any pelican, no, this is the female pelican, surrounded by her children in the nest, this is the mother pelican nestled in stained glass in churches the world over, plucking out her breast to feed her children. She pours out, she offers. And this is not a mirror for what we are to do as mothers or fathers, not exactly. I read the image years ago with my son tucked under my ribcage, still inside my skin. I looked at the pelican who is a symbol for Jesus, plucking, pouring out, and stood with my child in my body and my heart somehow outside it, asking - can you give me some of this heart, too? What I need for my son, I need for me. The pelican, wide wings outstretched, one eye glinting at me -
And improbable bird and an impossible gift.
I am unsure how to explain why I feel this need to settle her onto myself, as if having her etched under my skin will change me. But perhaps it will. Perhaps it is like the vow I stenciled on my finger seven years ago, a declaration and a hope. Perhaps bringing the pelican onto my arm is about bringing the impossible gift a little bit closer, or bringing myself a bit closer to the gift.
I don’t know how long I will be waiting for the tattoo, but the time seems less important, slipping by like the waters in which the Brown Pelican can be found, fishing, flying. I don’t know when I will go to the Gulf of Mexico, when I will watch sight of the improbable bird, when I will see the fish glint against the light as it disappears into her beak, or when I will crane my neck until it’s stiff and raw to see her for just one more moment.
I will be seeing her, and I will be seeing him, too.