The Tattoo
When I was about ten or eleven, my cousin and I were told of a way to make a tattoo from the juice of a fig tree. You could take a small new stem, slice it up the stem so you would have two flat pieces of stem to work with. You would put the cut side of the stem against your skin and hold it there for a little while. After we had done this and couldn’t see any tattoo, we stopped trying. It wasn’t until later in the day when it would start to itch and you could see that there was a red welt showing that you began to think that it might work after all. I had made a cross on my arm. It was sore and itchy. My mother looked at it and was worried that I might have gotten into some type of poison like poison ivy or something. When my father came home, she had him look at it. He examined it and said he would put some KIP ointment on it. I’m not sure what it was, but my dad put it on everything from scrapes, cuts, poison ivy and a myriad of other problems. My mom was worried, but Dad said...