Trigger Warning for Readers: Today’s essay is about suicide.

by Trystan Popish

We only had two sharp knives in the kitchen of our Seattle-area apartment, but I knew exactly which drawer concealed them.

The knives knew that my friend Jesi had died from a staph infection a few months before. They witnessed my boyfriend move out of our apartment and to New York for a two-year graduate program. They watched me lie on the couch night after night, alone and immobilized for hours. And the knives promised a solution. Come open the drawer, they called. Slide the cold black handle into your fingers. Caress the smooth, pale flesh of your forearm with the blade. Plunge the tip into your skin and carve a little line. Then another. And another. Until all this despair turns into something physical, something easier to fix than your shredded emotions.

For months, I fantasized about the knives, grateful that gravity had dialed up and kept me confined to the couch, instead of in the kitchen, carving into my left forearm. Being right-handed, I fixated on that side in particular, figuring my right hand could better control the knife and slice into the left side more gracefully. As though the elegance of the scars mattered.

Eventually, I would learn that this was a major depressive episode, one so bad I often stood on street corners, looking for a bus I could step in front of and into oblivion. I managed, somehow, not to cut myself during my three remaining years in Seattle. Later, I moved back to Colorado, but even there, my depression relapsed, and the knives would call again; the smooth, flawless flesh of my forearm would beg to be cut. Some days I made it as far as the kitchen, but I had yet to open the drawer.

Five years later, in summer 2020, while in the throes of another depression, I began working on a book of poetry. The book centered on the five gray years I’d lived in Seattle and my experience with depression. I wrote new poems and rediscovered old ones I’d written in Seattle, including one where I’d used magpies as a metaphor for words.

If you’ve never seen a magpie, they are beautiful birds: black and white with a long, elegant tail. In the sun, their feathers shimmer iridescent and flash blue, green, and purple.

While writing the poetry collection, I would frequently encounter magpies. I found their presence reassuring—each sighting a confirmation that I was on the right track. That I was healing.

In 2021, while working on the book, my sisters and I began discussing a possible sibling tattoo, the same or a similar design on all our bodies to celebrate our bond. I became obsessed with the idea. I searched Google for hours, sending my sisters dozens of photos of tattoo ideas each day, urging them to finalize our own design. Eventually, my older sister—fed up with my impatience—asked, Why the urgency? And I couldn’t answer her.

Even without a specific tattoo in mind, I’d known immediately where I wanted the tattoo placed: my left forearm. With every depression relapse, I would fight anew the temptation to cut into that specific chunk of my body, the soft skin too perfect a shell to reflect the turmoil beneath. I needed to change that skin, to break up the surface, and to place a reminder in my skin that life is worth living. As soon as I entertained getting a tattoo in that location on my own (and forgoing the sibling tattoo for the moment), my frenzy calmed.

I started researching magpie tattoos. The more I researched, I kept finding people with tattoos of a pair of magpies. Eventually, I found the old nursery rhyme about the bird. While some lines vary with the specific source, the first two lines stay consistent: one for sorrow, two for joy. I imagine people want a tattoo of two magpies as a good luck charm, a wish for a joyful life. But “one for sorrow” rang more true for me. One magpie to symbolize all the sorrow I was sifting through in my poems. One magpie to transform melancholy into something beautiful. One magpie to save me from the sharp edge of my own depression.

In the months that followed that decision, I found an artist who could draw realistic birds in skin. When her books opened up for new appointments, I poured my heart into the new client form, sharing my struggles and my wish to reclaim that piece of my body. I asked her to help me take that space and to create something beautiful. I asked her to place in my skin a reminder to survive.

On the day of my tattoo appointment, I went to the studio alone. The tattoo artist and I chatted for two hours (about writing, as it turned out) while she took my left forearm in her hands and conjured my magpie there. When she was finished, it wasn’t a revelation or a shock to see it. I had imagined the magpie on my arm for months. She had called it forth for everyone else to see, a piece of my story made visible.

I’d like to say I never thought of cutting again; I have. But the first time, post-tattoo, that I contemplated cutting my left forearm, my inked skin repelled the idea like a shield—I physically felt the jolt and the rebuff. That skin is armored now, and no other space on my body holds the same temptation.

I know, in the years ahead, the tattoo will fade, the flesh will wrinkle, the colors dim. The memory of why I got this particular tattoo may even go, but I’m hoping the feeling of protection—from the knives, from the dark, from myself— will linger as long as I do.

Photo by Natasha Miller on Unsplash

Please note: The national suicide hotline is available by calling or texting 988. Visit the website here.