CW: Mentions of self harm

I carefully walk up the wooden stairs, gripping the handrail. The scent of jasmine is sweet as I cross over to open the Dutch door. The sound and smell of the studio are overwhelming: the tang of green soap and vaseline, the clattering buzz of the machines. There is art everywhere: watercolors in bold primary colors, books on the counter filled with potential options. As I settle in, the razor flicks over my skin. I watch the fine blonde baby hairs of my arm shaved off, golden motes dancing in the sunlight. “You ready?” the artist asks. I involuntarily clench, but smile. “Born ready, baby.” Then the needle touches my skin and I relax into the pleasurable pain of being tattooed.

I got my first tattoo at 18, much to my parents’ chagrin. I don’t remember when exactly it was that I fell in love with the idea. Growing up in the punk scene, I couldn’t think of a specific person whose inked skin made me suddenly decide my skin needed to look similarly, mostly because everybody’s skin was tattooed. It was exactly what I planned to do the minute I was old enough, because I wanted to. Because I could.

So I drove in my green mini-van to the tattoo studio all my friends went to and spent the morning of my 18th birthday getting tattooed (with a tattoo of such poor quality and miniscule size that I would eventually cover it up entirely). Back then, more than 15 years ago, my tattoos were a declaration of selfhood, a way to decorate my body with things I loved. Back then, the niggling pain in my back was just a minor irritation, probably nothing big, just a discomfort from standing on my feet as I worked as a restaurant hostess. There was no connection between that pain and getting work done at a tattoo studio.

Except the back pain didn’t go away. It got worse. Some days, the pain was so bad that I would have to call in to the restaurant where I worked, gasping as I explained I wouldn’t be coming in that day. I graduated high school and moved away from my hometown to attend the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Days when I couldn’t work were inevitably also days when I couldn’t attend class.

I’d spend hours in bed, splayed out, trying desperately and carefully to not move at all. If I stayed still, I couldn’t feel the lightning bolts of pain shooting from my back into my ribcage, down my legs and into the soles of my feet.

Back then, the niggling pain in my back was just a minor irritation, probably nothing big, just a discomfort from standing on my feet as I worked as a restaurant hostess.
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At some point, the pain in my back relocated. It moved into my ribs, and my hips, and my ankles, and my legs. In desperation, I tried everything: visits to urgent care were followed by the chiropractor, then the acupuncturist. When they had no solutions for me, I added regular doses of ibuprofen to my repertoire. As the pain increased, so did the number of days I spend in bed. The pain was debilitating.

I moved from one specialist to the next. I felt increasingly disconnected from my body. I had never felt isolated from myself before. My body had always been me. After all, isn’t that the way most humans exist? Our bodies are ourselves. There is no separation from body and mind.

Except a natural separation begins to exist when your body stops behaving predictably. The body that I had relied upon for so many years, through karate lessons and long-distance running and college all-nighters, suddenly stopped behaving in a way I could anticipate. I could no longer trust that I would wake up and be able to complete all the tasks I needed to through the course of the day.

Hell, I could no longer trust that I would even be able to crawl out of bed. A creeping dysphoria set in: this is my body, but it is not myself. My body was separate from my existing, and both had to be managed in order to get through the day. As my dysphoria became more apparent, the act of being tattooed started to be less a declaration of selfhood and more about feeling a sense of control over a meatcage spun wildly out of control.

The idea of disability and dysphoria are no strangers to many other disabled humans. Jill Jones, a 34-year-old disabled woman from the San Francisco Bay Area, understands the idea of needing ownership over a body you no longer feel like you control — even though she lives with a disease that prevents her from being tattooed anymore. Her disease, hereditary angioedema type 3, is an incredibly rare, life threatening condition that causes episodes of edema (massive swelling) in various body parts, including the hands, feet, face, intestines, and airway. Without treatment, death occurs in approximately 25% of HAE patients.

“I feel like once I disclose my current diagnosis, artists don’t want to tattoo me,” she explains. “Minor physical trauma can trigger life threatening airway attacks at worst, and at the least localized swelling, bodywide pain and the need for a rescue shot that costs over $11,000.” Despite this, when she can be tattooed, it is a source of relaxation and euphoria for her; she’s even slept through long sessions before.

“Ownership is huge when you have no control over your bodily functions and you don’t know when your body will turn on you, killing you. You develop a fear, and a resentment of your body. It represents your illness and all the pain and loss that follows suit. So when I look at my tattoos it helps me to see me there, separate from the genetics that want me dead.”

After I was finally diagnosed with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (hEDS), a genetic, degenerative collagen disorder that causes my joints to easily dislocate, I began to reconcile the reality that my symptoms weren’t going to disappear. There is no cure for hEDS. As my understanding of my body evolved, the nature of my tattoos did, too. They started getting bigger, stretching across my entire shoulder and down my arm, or over my hip and across my thigh.

The pain of the actual session started to recede, too. I wasn’t so focused on the painful bite of the needle anymore, or wondering when the session would end. I started to look forward to the distraction of the hurt. It was a hurt I could opt-into, one I could select.

Jaz Joyner, a 27-year-old Black self-defined “womanperson who is a bit genderqueer,” mentioned that same concept of control when discussing her tattoos. After an emergency salpingo-oophorectomy to remove her fallopian tube and ovary, she was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), hypertension, and hyperthyroidism at age 13. An osteoarthritis diagnosis followed at age 18 (with three herniated discs in her back), and a diagnosis of fibromyalgia and tactile allodynia (painful sensation caused by innocuous light touch.) Joyner says that it was the pain from the tactile allodynia that got her into tattoos and body modification.

“I am often in pain or can’t control what my body feels from one day to the next, and that usually makes me feel powerless,” Joyner said. “Tattoos and piercings give me back that control. I pick where and when the pain will happen, and this pain comes with a reward: beautiful art I can keep forever.” In fact, Joyner’s first tattoo was representative of her experience with the medical side of her illness.

As my dysphoria became more apparent, the act of being tattooed started to be less a declaration of selfhood and more about feeling a sense of control over a meatcage spun wildly out of control.
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At some point, I stopped mulling over an idea for months or years before finally committing to it. I started looking at the sessions themselves as a respite from the normal pain of existing within my own body. Being tattooed was still painful, but as Joyner said: at least it was pain I could choose.

Selecting the pain meant it was not only bearable, but almost pleasurable. And, unlike the chronic pain from my rebellious meatcage, this hurt left me with a visible trophy to celebrate. Something about being able to run my fingers over the colorful artwork now permanently emblazoned across my skin felt like I’d come away a winner.

I knew that my reaction was, in part, a response to the associations I’d made with the act of being tattooed and the studios themselves. The positive connection in my brain left me dripping with positive endorphins and adrenaline. In fact, the idea of place attachment is the emotional bond between person and place, and a main concept in environmental psychology. The tattoo studio became an environment of safety for me, a place where I had the power to not only control my pain but shape it into something that felt valuable.

Andrea Lausell, a 25-year-old Latinx woman from Los Angeles, understood the interactions of brain chemistry intimately. “After a tattoo, I feel euphoric,” she said. “I feel in control of my body, and as a result of the pain, [I have] something I love on my body…” Lausell was born with Spina Bifida Lipomyelomeningocele, a birth defect where the spine fails to properly form.

She was diagnosed with Chiari Malformation, a condition where brain tissue extends into the spinal canal, in 2011. Over the course of her lifetime, she’s undergone 12 back operations and a skull decompression to remove a portion of her skull. “After a [medical] procedure, I generally feel drained and traumatized,” she clarified, in opposition to the elation of being tattooed.

In fact, this emotional connection to the experience is likely connected to the neurotransmitters the body releases during the tattoo process. Adrenaline, a hormone and neurotransmitter that plays an integral part to the flight-or-fight response, is one of those transmitters. Interestingly, adrenaline may also serve as a memory enhancer during these experiences, deepening our positive connection and place attachment to the experience.

Other neurotransmitters are also released during the tattooing process, including endorphins, which interact with our brain’s opiate receptors. Endorphins act similarly to morphine to reduce pain, and are released when we are injured. Since the act of being tattooed is hours upon hours of physical injury, needles digging into our skin and leaving ink behind, it’s unsurprising that the body dumps adrenaline and endorphins, affecting the experience.

Gabriel Vidrine, a 38-year-old transmasculine genderqueer human from Chicago, got their first tattoo when they were 18 — long before any of their chronic illness diagnoses. Vidrine lives with asthma, depression and anxiety, chronic migraines, and a subarachnoid cyst (a fluid-filled sac in the tissues surrounding the brain and spinal cord.) They came out as transgender at 35, and have connected their body dysphoria as the main trigger for their anxiety and depression.

“It’s a type of high. The pain itself is a distraction from everything else,” they said.“As a self-harmer, whenever I’d hurt myself, there would be this rush of endorphins, and I’d feel free and light for a day or two (perhaps what most people might consider ‘[feeling] normal). It’s the same with a piercing or a tattoo.”

While everyone who gets tattooed experiences the rush of endorphins and adrenaline, people with chronic illnesses may experience those factors differently. Pain perception can also be influenced in the brain itself: the brain can amplify, decrease, or outright ignore the pain. Additionally, cognitive and emotional factors also determine what happens to the pain signal. If we’re looking for something specific to focus on that isn’t our chronic pain, tattoos serve as an excellent distraction.

While our understanding of pain perception and how various factors influence remains poorly understood even today, the gate control theory of 1956 revolutionized pain research and remains the basis for much of our current understanding. In short, the theory posits that pain messages travel from the site of injury through nerve “gates” in the spinal cord before finally ending up at the brain.

The theory proposes that the activation of nerves which do not transmit pain signals can interfere with signals from pain fibers, thereby inhibiting pain. An easy example? You smack your funny bone on a desk. Then you rub your elbow, trying to stop the pain. The nerve signal produced by rubbing overrides the sharp pain and results in a decreased experience of the sharp funny bone pain.

If we’re looking for something specific to focus on that isn’t our chronic pain, tattoos serve as an excellent distraction.
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Though there isn’t any clinical research out there following up on the idea, it stands to reason that the vibration from the tattoo machine works in the same way that rubbing the smacked elbow does. For a period of time — especially in conjunction with adrenaline, endorphins, and positive place attachment — the body might tune in to the non-pain signals from being tattooed by a heavy machine that’s vibrating, drowning out the constant drone of chronic pain.

Science or not, the reality remains that a whole host of chronically ill humans view body modification as a way to control bodies gone terribly awry. To us, tattoos feel like freedom, like armor, like hope, and release. They’re a way to change a body out of our control, and a way to be gentle with ourselves during times when we’d rather be doing the exact opposite.

Jamie Rose, a 22-year-old nonbinary transgender human from Cardiff, Wales, described it succinctly. “While the tattoo is healing, I definitely have a lot more compassion for my body than I usually do; I think healing an acute wound is a lot easier than living with the day-to-day grind of a chronic illness.” Long after we’ve walked out of the shop, after the endorphins have faded, we’re left with artwork that we need to care for in order to ensure that it remains as beautiful after the fact as it did in the moment.  

“I see my body… as a canvas for something an artist has put hours of work into, that I need to respect and care for,” Rose clarified. “It also makes me feel more cool and confident and in charge of my own physicality, which is something that being disabled can often strip from me.”

Every time we finish a session, I practically skip down the stairs from the studio, carefully cradling my arm, barely feeling the normal hurts from descending a set of steps. I can hardly wait to get home and admire my newest work of art.

The Iliad is angry in a way I can relate to, in a way that many young women can relate to. Achilles cries, Patrokles cries, Thetis cries. All of them furious, all of them game-changers, and their tears don’t make them weak.

By Mikaella Clements

What you have to understand is this: It was my first real summer, in the literary, northern hemisphere sense of the word, and I was a little mad with the joy of it.

Australian summers don’t count. Australian summers wear you down and when they’ve finished wearing you down, they grind you into the ground with a week of 45-degree days that leave you panting and twitching. Also, the TV schedules don’t line up. Christmas cards are strange and hesitant or overly jolly. Everyday objects become enemies: seatbelt buckles, pavement, a flip-flop left too long in the sun.

Try that and then switch to a sedate UK summer — rain every other day, grey skies, and a warmth that is slow and sweet and embracing; there are curious and lovely smells in the air, and a complete lack of sunburn. (Amid all this, venturing into that the crappy tattoo parlor with its leather chair in the window of an arcade would start looking pretty good to you, too.)

For as long as I’d wanted a tattoo — about six years, at that point — I’d wanted a literary one. It stemmed from a 16-year-old obsession with Moby-Dick. I had essentially condensed the story into that moment where Ishmael casually details the day he found himself lacking pen and paper, so in lieu of writing, he tattooed the exact measurements of a whale skeleton onto his forearm. It’s a single, crystalline image, but more difficult to translate than you would think: After years trying to work out how to do it, rejecting lines of numbers and backing out at the last minute of one rather ambitious design, I still had no idea how to make my own whale measurements come to life.

But somewhere in there I found something else, some kind of patron saint: Achilles, the bad luck hero of Homer’s Iliad, the grimy dirty bastard who would never have been a saint, but would also never leave you in a tight spot.

The Iliad is a poem by the Ancient Greek poet Homer, who lived either around 852 BCE, or 1102 BCE, or somewhere in the middle of that 250 year gap, or maybe before or after that. We don’t know. We’re not really sure he existed. The Iliad itself, along with its companion, sequel poem The Odyssey, wasn’t written down until probably 760 BCE — but again, we don’t know. At the center of its pulsing, unknowable heart is Achilles, the half-divine Greek warrior who is the only man who can bring an end to the ongoing Trojan War, and the one who refuses to do so. You probably know him. (He was once played by Brad Pitt.)

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the lonely 16-year-old who loved Moby-Dick grew up to love Achilles; there is a certain portion of Achillean-like wrath in Moby-Dick. And beyond that, there is an understanding of tragedy, whether it is in the catastrophic moment — Achilles’s pride ripped away from him, Patrokles dead in the dirt — or in the slow grind of loneliness: Ishmael the last member of the crew, knowing when it’s about time he goes back to sea.

Herman Melville wrote, “I would up-heart, were it not like lead. But my whole clock’s run down; my heart the all-controlling weight, I have no key to lift again.” Melville was a Classics scholar, too, and he too had read the line where Odysseus tells Achilles, “Bear patiently, my heart, for you have suffered heavier things.” Personally, I’ve found Achilles is not too hard a heart to bear.

For the last three years, I’ve carried Achilles caught tight in my chest like some private saint. He’s not one you’d be wise to put your faith in, because Achilles leaves people in tight spots all the time, but I think if I dangled him from a charm on my wrist I’d be set. I wanted a personal Achilles, an Achilles keeping an eye out and catching my elbow. A Mikaella-Achilles, who thought I was important enough to come in and do things better when I needed it.

But instead of a charm bracelet, I got a tattoo.

I studied The Iliad in my second year of Classics at university. After only 18 months of studying Ancient Greek, it felt like an intimidating task, but that is the sly, wonderful thing about Homer: He is somehow the Greek author I am best at reading. It’s the Homeric rhythm that does it. If you immerse yourself in Homer the way we did, it becomes a language all on its own that is separate from Greek. There are rules and formulas and vocabulary to the language that is all Iliad.

Homer makes sense in tiny snatches, three or four words at a time, pausing, going on. My Greek teacher insisted we search for the caesura, the infinitesimal pause in the middle of each line, until finding it was instinctive. We approached each line with quiet, solid care, keeping an eye out for the caesuras as they came, pausing, waiting for their resolved meaning, then moving on.

Homer loves enjambment and quick short phrases — leaving you hanging, but always knowing what you’re hanging from. For the first few centuries (or less, or more) that the poem was known and beloved, it was an oral tradition. The Iliad wasn’t written down for a long time, and if you fit yourself into the dactylic hexameter that the poem is built upon, if you hear it instead of reading it, letting each word drop like a stone and be absorbed, the whole complicated thread of Greek untangles and lies sweet as a snake in your hand.

My first semester of Intermediate Greek I studied Herodotus and was hopelessly lost, out of my depth and struggling to make my way through endless sentences, hunting frantically for the right verb, any verb, god please.

Homer taught me to take things in a measured way, because everything is desperate.

I’d fretted over the potential Moby-Dick tattoo for six years, but when this new concept came to my head, I only thought about it for a couple of weeks at most. Then my girlfriend came home from her summer job at a milkshake shop in an arcade and told me that opposite her shopfront, a tattoo parlor had opened. They had a big glass window that opened onto the interior of the mall, waving in potential customers. They had a black leather chair that sat in the centre of this window, where my girlfriend and her colleagues gleefully watched people being tattooed all day long.

“God, why would you agree to that?” I said, rolling my eyes, when she told me. “It’s like you’re on some weird, painful display.”

“Maybe you should get your tattoo there,” she joked.

“Hey,” I said, slow, realizing, “maybe I should.”

We toed the idea back and forth for a week or so; I halfheartedly Googled some images. I wanted something simple and private, something that I wouldn’t have to explain to many people. On one morning I ate a bagel while my girlfriend put on her work uniform, and then, half by accident, I shuffled into the mall with her, and turned left into the tattoo parlor.

The tattoo artist looked at my proffered image for a moment and then made a small sketch on a piece of paper. “Like that?”

“Smaller,” I said, nervous, still haunted by the memory of that just-missed whale tattoo that was intended to take up my whole forearm. “I want it to fit under my knuckle.”

He nodded, and drew it again, then showed me how we could add shading to make the object itself more obvious: “Otherwise,” he said, “you’re going to get people thinking you got a thumb tattoo of a beachball or something.”

(Actually, Pokemon has been the most common guess. One uncle, examining it, asked me gravely if I was really such a big fan of pizza.)

I wasn’t so sure about the shading. It was my first tattoo and I was being a massive baby about it. “Let’s just do the outline first,” I said, settling into that display as confidently as I could, “and see what it looks like.”

Across the way, my girlfriend raised her eyebrows and gave me a wide-eyed look of surprise and a tentative thumbs up; her colleagues gathered around, giggling and staring.

Around the same time I was studying the Iliad at uni, I had a colleague, a nice guy with all the caveats that nice guys tend to have, who used to tell me that he couldn’t understand why I liked Achilles. Achilles wasn’t the trickster or the politician, he wasn’t nuanced or sympathetic or smart, he was just a brute.

Sometimes I think maybe Achilles is the best hero ever put down in any language. He is so fierce, so compelling, so dangerous, so compassionate, so human and so divine and as a result: so Other. When I was 20 and studying the Iliad, I had grown out of a lot of my high school queer kid loneliness, but not so much that I couldn’t recognize a fellow outsider. Far from the brute force my colleague and others have imagined, for me Achilles has always been about being both other (for my part: queer and female, for his: weird and half-divine) and sure that you’re angrier, smarter, cooler than all the people who are judging you — or afraid of you.

Homer taught me to take things in a measured way, because everything is desperate.

The Iliad is a poem interested in anger. There’s a moment early on when the goddess Athena grabs Achilles by the hair and pulls him back—hard—just as he is about to attack Agamemnon. Scholars argue she might be an anthropomorphisation (dios-morphisation) of Achilles’s own self-restraint. But for me, in that moment Athena isn’t there to provide a voice of reason or function as a symbolic second thought; she twists her hand in Achilles’s hair and hauls him back hard in mid-air, mid-jump. The Iliad doesn’t allow you the comfort of a metaphor: It is a poem about people hurting each other, and especially, hurting their favorites.

Achilles and his wrath is the most comforting and terrifying thing I can think of: world destroying, divine-reaching, natural-disaster level rage. Sometimes I think Achilles’s real hubris was just in being alive and being who he was. By Book 21, when in the middle of a blood-soaked, fury-routing turn on the Trojans, Achilles takes on a river god, but by that point? Everyone is just used to it; Hephaestion simply makes a face and saunters down to his aid.

Earlier in the same book when Lykaon, Prince of Troy, pleads for his life, both eloquently and reasonably, Achilles responds: Are you out of your fuckin’ mind, kiddo? Patrokles is dead. And look at me: I am so powerful, I am so beautiful, and I’m going to die, too. Who do you think you are?

The Iliad is angry in a way I can relate to, in a way that many young women can relate to. People cry in it a lot. Achilles cries, Patrokles cries, Thetis cries. All of them furious, all of them game-changers, and their tears don’t make them weak. For anyone charged with being overly-emotional: The Iliad is your poem.

Achilles has always been about being both Other (for my part: queer and female, for his: weird and half-divine).

Even the tragedy is furious, as in my favorite word in the Iliad, singular and unmissable: δυσαριστοτόκεια. The word that can only describe Thetis and does only describe Thetis. Dusaristotokeia: unlucky and fucked over enough to have borne the best son. The Thetis verb. Dusaristotokeia: I gave birth to you and you were perfect and now you’re going to die.

Back in the tattoo parlor, things were going strangely. The actual pain of it hit me with surprise — bad not in its extremity, but its unfamiliarity, and I was worried I was going to accidentally move my hand and jolt the needle. As the tattoo lines came to a close, the artist wiped away blood and raised his eyebrows at me. “Ready for the shading?”

“Actually,” I said, my voice thinner than I’d expected and trembling, “I think I might just leave it at this for a while… maybe I’ll come back for the shading when I’ve gotten used to it.”

“Sure,” he said. “Are you okay?”

I wasn’t, really; I was suddenly shivering, and there were weird tendrils of black creeping over my vision, receding, creeping back. My small breakfast was starting to feel like a mistake, though I wasn’t sure whether I wanted a more substantial meal or to throw up what little I’d eaten. The tattoo parlor staff gave me a collective concerned look, and someone handed me a Coke to get my blood sugar back up.

“Thanks,” I said, fumbling sips of it. “Thank you.” Across the way, my girlfriend was giving me worried looks too, along with questioning grins and gestures. I shrugged weakly at her. A passerby in the mall misinterpreted the direction of my shrug and made a who, me? face.

“Want to try standing up?” the tattoo artist asked.

“Sure,” I said, with what I thought was a tremendous amount of cheer. I stood up, took two or three tentative steps, and then collapsed against the wall, dropping the Coke and spilling it all over the store.

Outside, the passerby and the entire staff of the milkshake shop gaped delightedly, but thankfully by that time I’d passed out and couldn’t see them.

There are more than 250 deaths in the Iliad. Achilles’s is not one of them, but the threat of it is omnipresent, in verbs and in horses that swing their heads to tell Achilles, suddenly and sternly, that yes, they will carry him just this once more—and perhaps even again after that—but his doom is coming to him, and quickly now.

Death doesn’t come peacefully to the Iliad’s heroes. Their souls crawl out from behind their teeth; life deserts their limbs; blood is cast onto the sand and dirt as necks are caught on blades, chests on spears, heads on rocks. A simple swoon doesn’t really compare; it’s no surprise that in the poem, it’s mostly women who faint.

But that dizzying, public spectacle I made of myself was something strange and raw. I’d never fainted before. When I lurched to the side and slapped my palm against the cool wall, for a moment the dark in front of my eyes was unfamiliar. As far from sleep as you could imagine: pulsing, shattered, promising. Achilles never swoons outright, but when he hears of Patrokles’s death he falls to his knees on the dirt: that sudden, dizzying betrayal from gravity and body both.

I recognize the sensation, now, frightening in that it reduces you to impermanence, the boundaries of consciousness and bodily autonomy going very briefly blurry. When I opened my eyes again, sitting slack in a plastic chair, I looked first at the new dark permanency on my thumb. It looked a little silly. In the Iliad, Thetis goes to Hephaestion, the blacksmith god, for Achilles’s new armor, and it is Hephaestion who forges Achilles’s shield, with its five layers and elaborate illustration and hidden stories. Very far away from a small and crappy tattoo parlor in the middle of an arcade, but my vision was clearing and my thumb was throbbing.

Death doesn’t come peacefully to the Iliad’s heroes. Their souls crawl out from behind their teeth.

It was small and silly, but I liked it. I brushed my finger against the dark ink. This time, I stayed perfectly upright.

I never did make it back to the tattoo parlour for the shading on my tiny, pitiful tattoo: equal parts embarrassment and an absolute unwillingness to return to that chair for the strange tattoo zoo exhibition. Instead, I’ve let people ask me if it was a beachball, or a pizza, or a Pokemon ball, quietly carrying around the shield on my knuckle and leaving aside the story of why a shield, or whose shield it is, in favor of the — ultimately more entertaining — one about fainting for an audience.

Finger tattoos fade quickly — they’re being washed more frequently than other parts of your body. After only a year, mine is already blue-ish rather than the stark black lines it was for the first few months, and wobbly looking. Lately, I’ve been thinking about getting it fixed up a bit, including, at long last, that shading.

I’ve researched a more respected tattoo parlor this time, with one of the city’s best tattoo artists. And I’ve been thinking about a tattoo on the my other thumb’s knuckle to match: a helmet, those frightening Homeric helmets that mark only death and violence, the black nose-piece, the hard iron cheeks.

In the Iliad, Achilles’s armour is a transient, condemned object. Patrokles takes it, and dies, and Hektor takes it, and dies. But I want to build it up, piece by piece across my knuckles, until I’m not afraid of anyone, until my tears are only an asset to my fury, until it’ll take some divine collaring to hold me back. I’ve made Achilles mine.

And I’d take his doomed armor over anyone’s.