What Freedom Looks Like
WRITER, SOMETIME TV HOST, AND INK AFICIONADO, KARUNA EZARA PARIKH, ON WHAT FREEDOM MEANS TO HER
Writer, ink aficionado Karuna Ezara Parikh on redefining beauty, one tattoo at a time
Show me the hardest part of you, and I will be soft with it. Then show me where you are the softest, and I will be even softer.
Karuna Ezara Parikh
Writing political poetry, scripting stories on travel and feminism, working on movie scripts, and anchoring are some of the things that define me. Breaking stereotypes is something I enjoy doing. If my portraits are the embodiment of confidence, and encourage women to love themselves, be fit and own their bodies, with or without ink, getting tattooed, on the other hand, to me means making a bold statement. I stopped the count after my seventh tattoo, and now treat them as a holistic work of art, and my body as a canvas, where each tattoo tells a story.
The question I used to get asked a lot was, “What do your parents say?” Funnily enough (and much as my father may dislike tattoos), they don’t say a thing. Because the first story I was taught is that my body is my own. In a world that lays claim to and judgement upon a woman’s body from what size it should be to how much of it should show to how many babies it should have and where it should go…to tattoo my skin is not simply a rebellious, but almost a revolutionary act of feminism. As a woman, I reclaim my body each time I make it more my own through the act of recreating my physical being as art.
When I get a tattoo, I am becoming my own canvas. It is, for me, in a “modern” society that dictates what is beautiful, what is natural, what is morally okay for a woman, one of the most personal expressions of physical freedom. I try to view my body holistically, like some lengthy piece of modern art. When people ask—won’t you get bored, I want to ask back, “And you? Will you one day tire of your skin?” This is my skin. To grow bored of my tattoos, I would have to grow bored of my past, and the sum of my parts. My stories, my journeys.
Would you grow bored of a house you have built with your own hands, filling it over decades with objects from travels to the strangest places in the world? My soul cannot tire of a home it has laden and made unique with the riches it has collected as it wandered across unmapped lands. Thus, my skin has become a map to my heart, drawn in indelible ink, because the paths I have already walked are unchanging. And now they aren’t simply the paths that brought me here, but road signs to the paths I should take. And every single sign, points towards freedom.