Mark Doty's My Tattoo

Tattooed in Light: Reading Mark Doty, Remembering Bhai Nand Lal
by Shivpreet Singh

There’s a moment in Mark Doty’s poem My Tattoo that lingers like smoke in the chest:

“don’t I already bear / the etched and flaring marks / of an inky trade?”

He’s talking about grief, of course—how pain has already left its marks on the skin, on the heart, even before the tattoo needle ever hums to life. But reading that line, I found myself drifting not toward pain, but toward love. Not toward ink, but Naam—the sacred Name.

Because somewhere, centuries earlier, another poet wrote his own version of this idea. Bhai Nand Lal, the Persian-Sikh mystic and court poet of Guru Gobind Singh, once sang how the name of Guru Gobind Singh is written on his heart. 

Actually not written. Not whispered. Struck. As if the Divine Name were a blow to the heart, leaving a bruise of love that would never fade. Bhai Nand Lal's verse is filled with this radiant ache—the sense that remembering the Beloved isn’t just a mental act, but something physical, something permanent. The body becomes a page. The heart, a manuscript.

Reading Doty, I felt that same yearning. His tattoo isn’t ornamental. It’s a question. What belongs to me so deeply that I want it written on my skin forever? What name? What symbol? What silence?

And so I began a poem of my own. It's called The Smell of Your Tattoo, and though it's still taking shape, it begins with this idea:
I already have your name tattooed on my heart. I just didn’t need ink to prove it.

In my version, the Divine is not a thunderous force, but the presence behind everything—behind the light bending through steam, behind the silence playing in the grocery store aisle, behind even the scent of rain. I'm trying to write about that feeling. About how memory, longing, and grace carve themselves into us, more indelibly than any needle could. I don’t know when I’ll finish it. But maybe that’s the point.

Some poems, like some loves, are never really finished. They just keep writing us. 

Here is what I have for now: 

The Smell of Your Tattoo

by Shivpreet Singh

I have your name

tattooed on my heart,

in a script that looks suspiciously

like your handwriting—

though I’ve never seen you

hold a pen.

You tend to write

in thunder,

or the way the light bends

through steam rising from a teacup.

It’s not visible, of course.

Unless you count the way

my chest aches in elevators,

or how I flinch

when your silence plays

on the grocery store speakers

near the discount olives.

Your name’s in there—

between the scar from a bicycle fall

and the faint caffeine tremor

from the year I fell for espresso

and prayer at the same time.

Sometimes I wonder

if it’s a washable ink,

like the kind kids use

on valentines.

But no.

You wrote it in fire—

the kind that stays blue

even in rain,

like the smell of rain

that never quite

goes away.

A temporary thing

on another temporary thing.

Maya raining.