(Bordeaux) An artistic tattoo as the “end point” of a story. Women who have suffered breast cancer can get a tattoo for free in France to erase the stigma as part of Pink October, awareness month for this disease.
Posted at 10:20 a.m.
In front of the mirror, Nathalie Seguin, 55, discovers with admiration her tattoo: “Look at the work you have done”, she says to Yahell, her tattoo artist for the event called Rose Tattoo, which is held that day in Bordeaux, in the southwest of France.
A double ablation made his chest disappear, but we can no longer distinguish the scars: on the left, it is now covered with an immense Asian landscape, with a waterfall, stones, “because they are solid”, two koi carp — “fighting” fish — and Mount Fuji in the background.
A “zen” and natural decor that required nearly seven hours of work. Seven hours to close the book of seven years of life which revolved around cancer. Nathalie was affected for the first time in May 2015, first in the right breast.
“It’s a tsunami that we take,” she says. She underwent her first ablation two months later. A tree and a Buddha have already been tattooed in 2018 to erase their traces.
“It beautifies”
PHOTO THIBAUD MORITZ, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Pascale Mauray, 67, diagnosed with precancer at 41, had her breast reconstructed using her latissimus dorsi muscle, which left her with scars on two parts of her body. They disappear under the ink of the tattoo artist Marion (on the right) to give way to fine flowers: “it embellishes something that was not pretty”, slips the sixty-year-old.
In 2019, the other breast is affected. Nathalie “swapped everything at (her)”, angry at having to undergo a mastectomy and chemotherapy again.
But today, the tree and the Buddha blend perfectly with the waterfall and Mount Fuji. A “work of art” now adorns the bust of the fifty-year-old, who refused breast reconstruction because she had already suffered “too much”.
For Yahell, this drawing has just as much meaning: “we don’t save lives on a daily basis, but there, we help with healing”.
Breast cancer is the most common and deadliest in women worldwide, with some 54,000 new cases each year and more than 12,000 deaths in France.
During the first weekend of October, in a room of a hotel in Bordeaux, about twenty women chose to have tattoos. A first for most, like Pascale Mauray, 67.
“I’m not for the tattoo initially. But I organize Pink October in my village and when I came across Rose Tattoo, it was obvious”, she explains.
Diagnosed with precancer at 41, she had her breast reconstructed using her latissimus dorsi muscle, which left her with scars on two parts of her body.
They disappear under Marion’s ink to give way to fine flowers: “it embellishes something that was not pretty”, slips the sixty-year-old.
“I’m often told that the tattoo is an end point,” notes Nathalie Kaïd, president of the Sœurs d’encre association, which organizes the event. Other sessions are planned, notably in Paris.
She remembers the first edition, in 2016, where “there were seven tattoo artists for nine women. It was so powerful that it took me two months to recover from it”.
Since then, requests have increased every year. Volunteers must “wait a minimum of one year” after their last surgery and provide “a favorable medical opinion of less than three months”.
The tattoo artists, for their part, receive “technical and medical information” from a surgeon in order to find out about the physical and psychological consequences of cancer.
For Soeurs d’encre, the objective is to have artistic tattooing recognized as a method of reconstruction in its own right.
Coming to accompany her best friend, Sandrine, tattooed three years earlier, thus assures that she no longer sees “cancer”: “besides, I no longer speak of my breast, but of my drawing”.