Micah Ling december tat of the month

Often in our lives, we come across individuals and wonder if there is a greater meaning, or purpose, as to why two strangers’ paths met. The CRC has a storied past with this month's tat of the month contest champion. Her name is Micah Ling, and the CRC owners first met her in their college days. She ran on the same team. She even had the same major. It was like we were destined to have Micah Ling in our lives.

During the first year of the store, during the deepest part of winter when customers were not as frequent, we would sit in the back of our Dublin store and talk of days past. Often the conversation would lead back to those we knew, and why. Why were we destined to meet Micah Ling? Finally, our answer has been found. Meet our friend, the 2006 January Tat of the Month contest winner, Micah Ling.

While individual life-paths occasionally cross over, they ultimately are heading in different directions. (Although Eric and Matt's seem to have been stuck together for many years now, or perhaps they are both lost in the woods somewhere). Micah's path has led her to numerous accolades in the art world. While her talent rests in the art of writing, it is the art of design that brings her her greatest accolade to date. She's won the Georgia P. Albright Memorial Award in Poetry, the Kesling Award in Poetry, and recently finished a poetry manuscript entitled Three Islands. She teaches at Indiana University and DePauw University. Now, she is Tat of the Month Champion. Like anything in a poet’s life, her tat has a story.

Micah managed to 'fracture' her foot. It seems like a poet would search for a more descriptive word than fracture, because she broke every metatarsal. Destroyed? Crunched? Snapped? Obliterated? All words hurt. As you can imagine, it took some time to heal. For Micah, "the ink was kind of a healing symbol.” The compass features every phase of the moon, as to represent the completion of her healing. "It also points south, where I want to go." She's not necessarily talking about Hilton Head or Disney World. "In my poetry I write a lot about islands and escape...so I guess that leads to my favorite poet, Elizabeth Bishop, who also wrote a lot about travel and escape."

We can all be grateful that Micah has competed her healing, and has been running again for some time now. In Mizuno Wave Riders, to be precise. We are grateful she chose to commemorate it with a Tat, submitted it to the Tat of the Month contest, and brought some closure to our destinies together. Or has she?

In honor of Micah, we will leave you with an Elizabeth Bishop poem, The Fish.

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of its mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
— the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly —
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
— It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
— if you could call it a lip —
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels — until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

Do you want to be the running tat of the month? Send us a picture at info@columbusrunning.com or stop by the store. Please let us know why, how, and when you got the tattoo...