I have a scar through my right eyebrow. It’s been there as long as I can remember. My mother tells me that when I was learning to walk, I fell down, slicing my beautiful, young eyebrow on the edge of a coffee table. It had bled like crazy, as all skull cuts do, but had not required stitches. Instead, the doctor had used butterfly tape. As a young child, I wasn’t sure what butterfly tape was and had imagined a white butterfly using its tiny little legs to hold my brow together while it healed.
At about thirteen the scar started to really annoy me. It seemed an unkept, unmade part of my face in the beginnings of wearing purple eyeshadow and black liner. I used to take a black, BIC pen and mark in the scar every day before going to school. There were times other girls would spot the inked spot and make fun of it, or just asking about it was perceived as them not approving of me in some way—proof of my inferiority.
I took the tweezers and went to town, it seemed thinning them out made the scar somewhat less noticeable. My mother asked why I’d ever want to pluck away my signature trademark and warned that I might end up like one of those fat lunch-ladies at the school who had plucked so long they wouldn’t grow back, one of those who painted on reddish-brown, high arches that read as everlasting surprise.
Many years later, my ex-husband got a tattoo license and was doing some permanent make-up. He asked if I wanted him to take care of my troubled brow—he promised that he wouldn’t make me look like a circus clown, but his proceeding diabolical laugh ran me away from that offer.
When my only daughter was born, the year I was thirty, many people would first comment on her very distinct eyebrows and how stunning they were. I took such pride in a mirror of mine unharmed.
Photo: A picture I took in Ubud, Bali