As I sat in the chair with my leg elevated on a stool, the artist went to work with his motorized needle. My friend hovered nearby, squeezing my hand in support as waves of nausea and sweat rolled over me. The artist, a young man in his 20s whose epidermal surface area was almost entirely tatted up, asked if I needed a break. “No,” I moaned. “Just finish it.”

I wanted it to be over with as quickly as possible, and not just so my blood pressure would return to normal. After 10 years of wrestling with the decision to get a tattoo, I didn’t want to waffle at the last possible moment. I just wanted it done.

I chose a bumblebee, which is the literal translation of my Hebrew name. It was also a symbol for female leadership in the ancient Near East.

To those without a working knowledge of Hebrew, my tattoo seems devoid of an explicitly Jewish meaning. But as Rabbi Rochelle Kamins, the assistant director of youth programs at Kehillat Israel Reconstructionist Congregation in Pacific Palisades, Calif., noted in a study of Jews with tattoos, mine falls under the heading of “tattoos with symbolic Jewish meaning that don’t at first glance look ‘Jewish’ to an outsider.”

My desire for physical self-modification first surfaced back when I was a student in yeshiva high school, but was quickly quashed by studying the following verse in Leviticus: “You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, nor incise any marks on yourselves: I am the Lord.” My teacher merely explained that this sentence was the root of the prohibition against tattooing. He told the class that scratching and marking the body were things that idolaters did to mourn the dead and worship pagan deities. None of us peppered him with the obvious follow-up questions: What about tattoos that aren’t connected to mourning rituals? What about a tattoo of a flower or something similarly innocuous? Were these also off limits?

“The verses in Kedoshim were understood rabbinically not to mean a tattoo that says ‘Mom,’ ” Rabbi Joshua Gutoff, a Conservative rabbi and former director of the University of Minnesota Hillel, told me recently. Had I known this as a high-schooler, I still doubt I would’ve run to get marked up. I was still under the impression that getting a tattoo would preclude me from being buried in a Jewish cemetery. So, I settled for altering my appearance in less permanent (though by no means less fun) ways. Like the leaves, my hair hue changed with the seasons. I pierced my ears multiple times. I dressed wildly. And for a time, that was enough.

For those who don’t have the need to show off, my urge might be difficult to comprehend, and Jewish tradition certainly does not help to bridge the understanding gap. As Jews, it sometimes feels like we only value our bodies from the neck up. “Traditional elite Judaism is a verbal culture,” Gutoff explained. As a youngster, I encountered this bias when I tried to enroll in gymnastics lessons. After being introduced to the sport at a birthday party, I began to pester my mother, a history teacher quick to call herself terribly uncoordinated, to take me for classes. At first, she rebuffed me, and I had to resort to traditional Jewish means to train: checking out all the gymnastics-related books from the library. After a year spent teaching myself skills from diagrams in books and crashing into our living room furniture, my mother finally found a gym for me to practice in. Though my mother was eventually supportive of my participation in the sport and my subsequent involvement in break-dancing, she never understood why I had to do it, and, as a child, I could scarcely articulate my reasons.

Not that I’ve done much better as an adult. Sure, like any overeducated Jew, I can intellectualize my compulsion with the best of them. I even wrote an entire master’s thesis about the relationship between Judaism and gymnastics. But no matter how hard I try, I feel like I’m always just missing the mark.

So it also was with tattoos. I readily acknowledge that it is highly irrational to brand your body permanently with an image you could just as easily (and less painfully) hang on your wall, yet I felt that was an inadequate substitute. The image, I felt, simply had to be embodied.

In 2007, the New York Times published a piece about tattooed Jews and burial rites, calling the whole claim that the inked-up were shunned from Jewish cemeteries a bubbemeiseh. I told my hair stylist, who at the time was touching up my brown roots with fuchsia paste. She has a sleeve full of ink that I’ve often admired, a painting of the beautiful night sky, reminiscent of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. “You should definitely get one,” she said.

And still, I waited. Knowing that I could be properly interred even with a tattoo was important but by no means the only barrier to my getting one. I’ve crossed many halakhic lines in my move away from Orthodox Judaism, but there seemed to be something so final about marking one’s body permanently even if it ranks below violations of the Sabbath and the laws of kashrut (two areas where I’ve transgressed). I wasn’t sure if I was ready to make that sort of statement.

There were also other reasons not to get inked. Though it is not difficult to redefine the verses in Kedoshim to permit the type of tattooing that is popular today, or to point to sentences in Isaiah that seem to allow or even encourage marking one’s body with the name of God, pointing to biblical verses only gets you so far. It is impossible to turn the legal clock back to biblical times and simply wrestle with the text; in the millennia since, rabbis have added their interpretations, and in a rare moment of consensus, every denomination—from Reform to Orthodox—has ruled against permanent body art regardless of intention. More modern opinions often cite that we’re created b’tzelem elokim, in the image of God, and who are we to mess with perfection? Of course, this doesn’t seem to apply to plastic surgery, which is permitted.

But who’s to say that b’tzelem elokim must refer to our physical beings? If the fact that we’re embodied is what makes us godly, then the way we treat animals, who are also made of flesh and blood, is even more shameful than it already is.

“The Torah itself seems to tie to humanity’s ability to make moral judgments, that is, to distinguish good from bad and right from wrong,” said Rabbi Elliot Dorff, the chair of the Conservative movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards. There’s really no way of knowing for sure what, if any, we possess of the Divine’s body. Maybe we got his eyes. Or maybe we simply received his winning personality. I sure got his temper.

Of course, rationalization works both ways, and just as I’m motivated by an irrational desire, so too, perhaps, are the rabbis who are repulsed by the act and come up with easily deconstructed reasons to forbid it. Which begs the question, why? Why did the Jewish distaste for body art result in a myth that forbade burial and seemed so plausible that it was believed by so many for so long?

I think that to understand this we must return to the original prohibition, which revolves around death. The pagans to whom the Torah refers, both in Leviticus and in Deuteronomy, were using markings that were used to commemorate the loss of a loved one, which the sages saw as sinful since it signified an inability to accept the divine will. We Jews rend our garments, which are fixable. But perhaps the tattoo taboo has everything to do with how scared we are of doing something to ourselves that is as permanent and irreversible as death.

When you reveal to a person that you have a tattoo, the first question they ask (after they look at it) is whether you think you’ll regret it in five, 10, 15 years’ time. “I don’t know,” I respond. “Maybe I will,” and for a moment they seem vindicated in their disapproval, imagining me as 65-year-old grandmother bemoaning the image I branded onto my ankle in my late 20s. “But,” I add, “even if I don’t like it in the future, I’m sure I’ll learn to live with it.” Just as I accepted the bump on my nose and the scars on my abdomen and spine from surgery, I’m confident that I can find the humor in the bumblebee on my ankle even if I eventually wish that my younger self had shown better judgment.

And that’s advantage the living—even the tattooed living—have over the dead: We can move on from illness, injuries, and even a regrettable tramp stamp.

But now, as a regular visitor to Israel, I see a different country, especially in Tel Aviv, a city that has pioneered a free-flowing hedonistic lifestyle that promotes free expression in art and fashion. The campus of Tel Aviv University offers a parade of inked bodies. Which is partly why, though I’m not an Israeli, I decided to join Israel’s tattooed ranks during a visit this summer. But, unlike the bulk of Tel Aviv’s inked masses, I’d recently survived a harrowing ordeal, and a tattoo seemed as good a way as any to mark it.

The Jewish taboo against tattooing is culled from a verse in Leviticus: “You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves: I am the Lord.” There is a great deal of additional rabbinical commentary supporting this prohibition, including the notion that the human body is created in the image of God and, thus, to tamper with it is a kind of blasphemy. In recent times, the taboo has become more rooted in contemporary history than in biblical injunction—linked as it is to memory of the Holocaust. The sight of survivors’ tattoos traumatized a nation and a people, as it should have. A friend of mine whose grandparents perished in Auschwitz nearly threw his oldest son out of the house on their kibbutz when the son came home with a tattoo.

After making an appointment at Kipod on King George and Allenby Streets, I had to choose a design. Until I entered the tattoo studio, I had little sense of the final marking. But I knew where I wanted it to be (my upper right shoulder), and I knew that I wanted something that had a somewhat generic elegance to it, since it and I would grow old together.

I came equipped with pictures of lotuses and roses, different shapes and colors, but it wasn’t until I sat down in the studio and looked through the picture books that I decided on a final design: a rose with a sense of movement that makes it look like it is budding right on my back. And I chose the color black; Tel Aviv women may not dress in black from head to toe, but me and my fellow New Yorkers are persistently robed in it, and so it seemed to make sense to me to have my tattoo match the rest of my wardrobe.

The operative word in the previous sentence, though, is “chose.” As it turns out, my new rose is the third tattoo on my body—but the only one I asked for. Sixteen years ago, I was diagnosed with treatable breast cancer, and I had to go through a six-month radiation treatment. Prior to this treatment, the doctors outlined the area to be radiated with two tiny tattoos. Some women get these removed after their treatment, though it’s advisable to keep them in case you have a recurrence so that a doctor will see these telltale signs when considering further treatment.

Sometimes, I stare in the mirror and try to smudge away the unsmudgeable—these navy blue dots that appear intermixed with my natural body markings. These tattoos were not by choice; they mark an attack on my body and on my life by a deadly disease. As fixtures on my chest, they are reminders of the disease and of my triumph over it; but either way, they are reminders of a time in my life when I was out of control.

My new tattoo is something I did for me. It has no political or religious significance for me, nor does it show disrespect for my body, as the Leviticus passage implies. Rather it is a sign of respect for my body—and for me—to create a unique design on my skin that is not harmful. It doesn’t connote something dark or destructive. It’s about my own personal choice, making a decision for which I was fully in control. It’s playful and distinctive, like the city where I had it done, born from the past but not wedded to it, influenced by its own people’s history but not fated to relive it.

Jo-Ann Mort writes frequently about Israel for a variety of publications.