Duck Tattoos

Are those ducks tattooed on your wrist?

Yes, I have three duck line art doodles tattooed on my wrist! Each duck represents one of my kids.

My grandmother used to sign every birthday card with these doodles and would draw a whole family of ducks. Back in the days when we would stay with her in Miami Beach in the 80’s, we would spend every day at the beach in the water until we got prune-y. We would snorkel the whole day. No sunscreen. I just remember a lot of juicy mangos from the tree in their backyard and the walks to and from the beach.

She would sing us a nursery song of German origin (but in Ukrainian) called “Alle Meine Entchen” which roughly translates to “All My Ducklings”. We would walk each morning at low tide to collect seashells and see what the ocean washed up (a lot of seaweed with interesting creatures we would shake into buckets and come across beached baby sharks occasionally). I have a massive collection of shells even today.

She used to hot glue gun the shells into quirky sculptures, add googly eyes, place it on a large shell and voila! A soap dish! My grandmother is one of my inspirations to do creative things and overcome challenging times.

She survived World War II and described Miami Beach as paradise. She wasn’t wrong about Miami Beach. It was paradise and I was oblivious until my 20’s about the insane drug cartel activity going on there at the time when all these retirees were basking in the sun!

Sometimes I wonder if we inherit our ancestor’s trauma and this is part of why we are seeing so many mental health issues. My grandmother’s brother was kidnapped by the German army and forced to work in a factory as a young teenage prisoner of war. He returned to Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine after the war ended (my grandmother was already in the U.S.). When my grandmother returned to her childhood home, according to villagers, hopeful to reunite with him, she learned instead boys like her brother were shot by pro-communist Russians, who deemed them all traitors. Her mother, contracted tuberculosis during the forced famine by the hands of Stalin (called the Holodomor genocide), ultimately was sent away to a TB Sanatorium in Crimea when my grandmother was young and eventually died shortly after she returned to her family. Friends and neighbors attended a funeral held at their home. As German soldiers passed by and inquired about what was going on, one soldier was annoyed at my grandmother’s dog barking and pulled out a revolver and shot her dog! She was only 8 years old at the time.

My grandmother would recount how a year or two later, she went into town one day to get their ration of bread, witnessed starving bloated Ukrainians everywhere. While she was gone, her father succumbed to starvation and was buried before she returned. She had no family left in town and decided with her best girl friend Valentina, who was also around 11 or 12 years old to join a caravan of orphans and homeless people lead by soldiers headed west. Somehow they survived, stuck together, eventually became nurses’ aides at a hospital in Austria at the time when many concentration camp survivors were being released and brought to the local hospitals.

Eventually, at age 16 she ended up in Karlsfeld, a displaced persons camp in Germany, still looking for her brother. It was there she met my grandfather, married and immigrated to the US five years after the end of World War II.

My tattoos serve as a reminder of my grandmother’s story, her creativity, resiliency and ability to find paradise despite the atrocities of her life. I really love and relate to the visual that a duck glides seemingly effortlessly on the smooth surface of the water, but paddles feverishly beneath the surface of the water to stay afloat and move forward in life.