by Bethan Jones

Created on: June 03, 2009   Last Updated: June 04, 2009

Of the twelve tattoos I have, half are pieces of text and words that have some meaning for me, that allow me to express myself in ways that I otherwise wouldn't be able to. I have everything from poetry to pieces of a film script tattooed on me, and they are the tattoos that I love the most. They are the tattoos that allow me to express myself the most; that let me really be myself.

Words have always been important to me. I began writing at a young age and found that I could express a lot through the written word, much more than I could through speech. I found that writing enable me to convey thoughts that were running around my mind far more articulately than saying them ever could.

Having also been a voracious reader from a young age I have seen the power that words have to change a person: the Bible, the Qu'oran, the Bhagavad Gita have all changed people's perceptions of the universe, morality and good and evil. Sometimes for good, sometimes for wrong, but the undeniable fact is the words in those texts contain power.

And it isn't only in religious texts that words hold power; the number of times I have read a book and been moved to tears by the quality of the writing, the sentiments being expressed, are numerous: Pepper dying in The Saddle Club, Beth's reaction to the piano she got given in Little Women, the ending of The Town That Died by R.L.Lee. All of those were written with such eloquence that I felt like I was there with the characters, watching the same things they were watching, feeling the same things they were feeling. More than anything else I wanted to do that with my own writing; allow people to feel what I was feeling, show them that sometimes 'normal' doesn't exist. I wanted be able to say that my writing had helped someone, even if it was only one person.

Holding a pen above a blank sheet of paper is the same for me as an artist holding a paintbrush over a blank canvas. There is so much power, and apprehension, in the waiting; what will I write, will it be any good, will I be able to say what I want to say? Holding a pen above a blank sheet of paper turns the paper into my canvas, in the same way that my body become a canvas under the tattooist's hand, and so it was only natural that the tattoos I got moved from flash to custom designed pieces of text which meant something more to me.

The first piece of text I got tattooed on me was the line 'not all those who wander are lost', taken from a poem that appears in Tolkein's Lord of the

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