The Force Is Strong: Why I Have a Star Wars Tattoo

Author: Xenia Ludsteva

 

Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens is showing Friday April 22 at 8:45 Saturday April 23 at 9:20, and Sunday April 24 at 7:15 at Cornell Cinema. For advance tickets, please go to the tickets website here.

 

I am a big believer in connecting the dots. No man is an island. Nothing happens in isolation. With a careful eye and a keen mind, one can coax a series of logical patterns out of our seemingly chaotic being – and shape herself into what she is, a narrative. Therefore, tattoos always made intuitive sense for me. For what is ink under your skin if not a powerful affirmation, a question mark, a comma in a story into which you wake up every day, the one you spin to justify your existence.

 

 

A tattoo is a conceptualization of an idea, a stage of my inner growth I want to mark, manifest and carry around with me – so important and enduring that I welcome the thought of forever. So choosing to get a new one and coming up with a design becomes a laborious and gradual process which usually lasts over a year – of untangling thoughts, memories and feelings, and translating them into an image, of bringing soul, mind, and body together to a point where not being inked feels wrong.

 

 

Wonderful, you say, but what does any if this have to do with a Darth Vader and his Death Star stretching across your entire quad? “Because,” I respond, “I am a Jedi, like my father before me.” And, before you sigh in exasperation – hear me out.

 

Luke Skywalker is a splendid yet unlikely epic hero. He sets out to pick up some power converters in Episode IV, and ends up saving the galaxy through kindness. He proves both the Jedi Master Yoda and the Dark Lord of the Sith Palpatine wrong when he refuses to give up on his friends (Episode V) and his father (Episode VI). He places his faith in those around him. On one level, Star Wars is about how it is enough to be a farmboy from a backwater planet to change the ways of your world – if you refuse to accept its rotten impossibilities and your heart is in the right place.

 

 

On the other hand, Star Wars says that you must accept who you are. Luke’s character is impossible without the shadow of Darth Vader – an enemy to overcome, a truth to face, and a father to stand up for. In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke enters the cave on Dagobah armed with his lightsaber – and fear. He encounters a phantom of a Sith Lord and slays it – only to see his own face under the black mask. Later, in the Cloud City, cornered by Vader, he chooses to jump into the void under his feet rather to step onto that path. And in the end of The Return of the Jedi, Luke honors his father with the same choice between the impossible and the imminent, to kill his Emperor or his son. Even if we come from a place of evil, we need not let that evil rule over us. But we must look it in the eye and recognize how it shapes us – and then set it free. And from that may come a pure, burning light.

 

 

And what I happen to have on me is a culminating scene of A New Hope – the geometric pattern of the x-wing’s viewpoint, as it rushes towards a nearly impossible target, trapped between two imminent deaths, as above so below. “The Force is strong in this one” – a moment of both recognition and opposition, which sets up the development of the trilogy and leads to the Empire’s fall. This self-informing dichotomy of knowing where you come from and establishing who you are is very important to me. It is a line I trace through this soap opera and which spills into black ink under my skin. A reminder and ambition to handle life as well as Luke Skywalker did.

 

 

But the story is far from over, and it is a great time to be a Star Wars fan. The franchise is omnipresent and is as firmly cast into America’s pop culture as Han Solo is into carbonate. Star Wars evokes something for everyone, maybe not always love, but at least polite acknowledgement – like grilled cheese. You can’t escape it. But I encourage you to look a bit closer and ask your own questions. Come see The Force Awakens in Cornell Cinema this weekend – and connect your own dots.