Flowers and butterflies surround the scars left by the removal of Jacqueline van Schaik’s breasts, thanks to a new tattoo the cancer survivor says she treasures.
“It’s magnificent,” exclaims an emotional Van Schaik, 56, looking at herself in the mirror at the end of the session at a tattoo parlor in the central Dutch city of Lelystad.
“I don’t see the scars anymore. I only see this gem,” added the mother-of-one, who underwent a double mastectomy after being diagnosed with cancer in October 2020, followed by extensive chemo- and radiotherapy.
Photo: AFP
Her tattooist, Darryl Veer, is part of a growing group of ink artists ready to help women love their bodies again after the traumatic experience of a mastectomy.
Around one in seven women in the Netherlands develops breast cancer during their lifetime, Dutch health authority figures said.
Breast removal is necessary in a third of these cases, according to a Dutch Web site specializing in cancer.
Myriam Scheffer, 44, suffered the same fate. She too wanted a tattoo on her chest — “most probably a large bird spreading its wings” — but her scars have not yet healed enough.
In the meantime, she decided to help others like her by setting up a foundation last year to offer free tattoos to women in the same situation.
Van Schaik is the first-ever recipient.
‘BEAUTIFUL THING’
The idea of tattoos for breast cancer survivors already exists in the US and France, but Scheffer, who has an eight-year-old daughter, hopes to develop the initiative across Europe.
Interested women can contact her from June on her foundation’s Web site, tittoo.org. There, they can meet the tattoo artists, plan the artwork and sessions, set for October to raise awareness for breast cancer screening.
Thanks to her foundation, Italian and Swedish women will be able to do the same later this year, most likely in Florence and in Stockholm, where there are active groups of so-called “flatties” or “flat women,” Scheffer said.
She hopes to expand the scheme to Belgium and Germany next year.
Scheffer’s foundation only works with tattoo artists who, like the 36-year-old Veer, already have experience of covering up scars.
After three sessions with Van Schaik, each lasting several hours, the tattoo artist looked visibly relieved.
“I was under pressure, because the last thing I wanted to do as an artist in a case like this is to mess up,” Veer laughed.
“Making somebody happy really is the most beautiful thing you can do with a tattoo.”
‘PRECIOUS FEELING’
Schaik’s chest is now covered up to the shoulders with two red flowers, whose stems seem to take root at the bottom of the scars, and blue butterflies.
The tattoo artists work around the scars but do not ink them directly.
“To see yourself as beautiful and to like yourself again: it’s such as precious feeling and I had lost it,” Schaik said.
The operation “took something essential away, a part of what makes you what you are, and that made me very sad,” said Van Schaik, who suffered “every side effect imaginable” during her two-year treatment.
When hormone therapy didn’t work, Van Schaik, who has a 17-year-old son, opted for a mastectomy in April 2021.
But losing her breasts meant she “suffered a lot, physically and mentally.”
“Every day I stood in front of a big mirror when I got out of the shower. I looked at the scars and I saw what had been removed from me,” said Van Schaik.
“I thought of taking down the mirrors at home. But now, they can stay.”
The last couple of weeks I have been traveling across the island of Panay in the Philippines, visiting my wife’s family. Inevitably, I have spent a lot of time on the trip comparing the Philippines to Taiwan and contemplating the rich, ancient connections between them. I could wax eloquent on politics or history, but today I’m going to talk about that most lowly of food items, the humble green. That’s what I miss the most whenever I leave Taiwan, and of all the nations around Taiwan, the Philippines presents the sharpest contrast on this topic. Our benighted, myopic tourism bureau may
The cool, clean river water quickly evaporates as I warm myself in the tropical sun, still strong at midday even in November. Below me is a bend in the river, and a deep emerald pool has formed here alongside the concrete platform I am sitting on, which once served as a check dam, but today serves as the perfect place to launch myself into the water. On shore, children splash in the water as parents sit nearby under awnings. Above me, a hawk traces out lazy circles against the bright blue sky. In the distance, a train emerges from a
Feb. 6 to Feb. 12 The plan was to break out of jail, seize the facility’s ammunition, release the inmates and broadcast their “declaration of Taiwanese independence” to the world at the nearby Broadcasting Corporation of China station. Chiang Ping-hsing (江炳興) and his fellow political prisoners at Taiyuan Prison (泰源監獄) hoped that this action would attract international attention and spark a nationwide rebellion that would overthrow Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) authoritarian regime. It was originally planned for Feb. 1, 1970, but due to various setbacks they weren’t able to strike until the noontime guard change at the prison on Feb. 8. They attacked the
Milf Manor is the house that Freud built. Eight women aged between 40 and 60 arrived at this beachside villa in Mexico to film a dating show, somehow missing the twist: the lineup of young men they’d be in the villa with would include… their sons. The show premiered in the US last week, and I have screamed hoarsely through every video I can find, shouting, “I HATE IT I HATE IT OK ONE MORE CLIP I HATE IT!” into my arm. You know how Big Brother and its fellow reality shows used to claim they were sociological experiments in order
RSS