My phone opened to the front-facing camera from my lap, and suddenly I was looking at a stranger: all nostrils and double chin and... what was happening with my neck?! The camera had caught me from below, that particular smartphone angle that turns everyone into a confused turkey wattle, and I was staring at what I can only describe as a Jabba the Hutt in tubing mascara.

…Is that me? That's me. Oh.

And then came the middle aged feminist second arrow: Sure, my freakout was a little bit about vanity, but then came the shame of having the reaction at all. I'm a 50 year old woman who’s spent decades doing good work around body positivity and the particular ways women get ground up by patriarchal beauty standards. (Does anyone remember how weight loss / body image subjects were verbotten on the forum associated with Offbeat Bride back in the day? As a publisher, I refused any advertisers that focused on telling brides how they needed to look!)

Confronted with my own Jabba wattle, I was overcome with the self-critique: Aren't I too smart for this? Too progressive? Too thoroughly de-programmed? Apparently my nervous system missed that memo entirely, and was just going to go ahead and have feelings about my sagging neck skin regardless of my politics.

Neck skin first appeared on my radar in my late 30s, hearing a friend in her mid-40s voice some insecurity about her throat. She was youthful and active and hippie-adjacent, the kind of human who used sunscreen and never wore much makeup. But it didn't matter: Gravity comes for everyone, and everyone notices.

I filed it away: even women who do everything right and seem blasé about how they look still have to reckon with gravity eventually. I thought I was just taking notes, but the truth is that I was also starting to monitor my own neck like it was on a slow countdown.

There's a Chinese idiom: 岁月是把杀猪刀. Time is a pig-slaughtering knife. The image is deliberately unglamorous. This less dramatic swords or romantic blades, and more a workman-like butcher knife doing its indifferent job without malice.

By my late 40s the carving was visible. The skin on my throat was doing what skin does when a body has been moving through space and time for half a century: it was showing the evidence.

I assessed my options with clear eyes:

If we’re lucky, we’re all pre-disabled. Aging is the process of enjoying what you have, releasing what you're losing, and making some kind of peace with the annihilation of your own inevitable death. Aging is also, not incidentally, a privilege. A lot of people don't get to have a neck wattle. By this middle age, we all have more than a few friends who didn't make it this far.

The surrender move was familiar to me. A decade ago, after several back to back medical situations left me with significant abdominal scarring, I got those scars tattooed rather than hidden. Commemorating survival rather than concealing evidence of it? …I LIKED how that felt. I liked what it did to my relationship with my own body. You can’t fight the inevitable, might as well celebrate it.

So when I looked at my throat and felt the familiar pull toward either shame or expensive resistance, I thought: what if instead I just made it beautiful? If I’m learning to love this very natural new hang of this part of my body, I might as well decorate it to enjoy the process. If you can’t knock it, ORNAMENT IT.

I told no-one because I didn’t want to workshop the idea. It was just for me.

Now, what would it be? I wanted something that felt like time itself. Cyclic, inevitable, always changing. The moon is my oldest reminder that nothing stays and nothing is lost, it just moves through its phases, and I find that comforting in a way I don't need to over-explain to anyone who grew up with hippie parents.

I started sketching a lunar cycle running vertically down my throat, the full progression of moon phases with a lunar eclipse at the center, envisioning fine line work that would trace my anatomy like jewelry rather than announce itself like traditional flash.

Then I found Abi.

Those of you who are serious about tattoos know that tattoos can be Very Serious Business. Artists have months or even years-long waitlists. People fly out of state to work with their favorite people. Costs can be thousands of dollars, especially for something high pressure and highly visible like a throat tattoo.

But I found Abi not through an exclusive waitlist or a thousand-dollar consultation with a sought-after artist in a converted loft space, but rather in a strip mall in Kirkland, a year out of her apprenticeship, skilled in exactly the fine line geometric ornamental style I wanted. I found her on Google, and she had an appointment available almost immediately.

When I came in for the consultation she told me straight out: “I've never done a throat tattoo before,” she said. “I’m a year out of my apprenticeship and I talked to my mentor about methods, but I wanted you to know.”

“Do you feel confident about doing it?” I asked her.

“I do,” she said.

“Then I'm confident in you,” I said. “Let's go.”

Getting a throat tattoo means lying on a table with your chin tipped back while someone presses on your windpipe stretching out the skin of your neck, and hovers over your face with a buzzing needle. It requires a particular kind of trust and a particular kind of breath.

Abi and I found a rhythm almost immediately: she would lean in and work while I dropped into the deepest end of my meditative breathing, that dissociative meditative place where pain becomes information rather than emergency. I would breath shallow and stay still. I would not swallow, so as not to move her canvas.

Then Abi would lean back, I would swallow and breathe deep, and we would both reset.

A few minutes in, she said, “This feels like we're doing yoga together.” She was right… that was exactly what we were doing.

The strip mall studio in Kirkland was loud and bright with an open floor plan, music and laughter. I could have paid 5 times the amount for a tattoo in a highly respected artfully-lit deeply spiritual studio literally called ALTAR, but whatever.

I heard almost none of the noise. I was too far inside the breathing, inside the experience of choosing to be present for something being permanently etched into one of the more visible parts of my body.

Abi warned me that extra fine line work can heal light, and so she included a second follow up session for free. The healing process was relatively easy. The lines were so thin that there was very little pain, minimal itching, and almost none of the scabbing and peeling that can happen with tattoos. After three weeks, however, it was clear that the lines felt a little pencil-y, and so I went back for my second pass. Now I have dark, crisp, clean lines tracing down my windpipe, onto my chest.

At 50, with three books and a 20 year old business and a 16 year old kid and a life lived expansively, I am not particularly concerned about convincing anyone of my legitimacy. The tattoo doesn't undermine my credibility, because my credibility is in my CV and author list and my credit score.

The tattoo just lets you know that you're dealing with a high functioning eccentric. (It’s especially fun when I dress in the old money mainstream drag that my son for some reason loves seeing me in. Oh, you like my navy skirt and linen shirt and heels? SURPRISE I’M A FREAK!)

So now there it is, for the rest of my life: a column of moon phases running from my collarbone to the underside of my chin. It will exist after I am dead. It’s there every time I look in the mirror, it’s there every time someone catches a glimpse of it, and touches their own throat and asks me what it is.

I'm never quite sure how to answer. Sometimes I just say it's a tattoo. (Even my friends seem confused by it… is it henna? A temporary decal? Some kind of jewelry?) Sometimes I say it's a piece of performance art about the passage of time in the cellular space ship that is a human body. Other times I explain that it’s a meditation on aging. With some folks, I say that it’s an act of grace and me learning to love my own death process.

What I usually mean is: this is what it looks like when you soften into what you can't change, and make it yours. The butcher's knife is going to carve you regardless… you can’t control it, but you have the agency to choose your ornamentation of surrender.