The world from far away

The second Christmas after my treatment finished I was at the work Christmas party when one of the young lawyers asked me if I had any tattoos.

“Yes,” I said, and I showed them one of my dots.

They looked closer. “What is it?”

Without missing a beat I said, “It’s the world from far away.”

They smiled, slightly confused, and another of the young lawyers said “Really? That’s kind of cool”. The conversation moved on. But the words stayed with me.

When I lay on the radiotherapy table with my arms above my head while the radiographers lined me up, carefully, deliberately, as if my body were something that had to be read exactly right. The room was cool. The lights were bright. Radiotherapy is all about precision: millimetres matter, breath matters, stillness matters.

And so did my tattoos.

Three tiny blue-black dots, freckle-sized and permanent, placed across my torso. They aren’t decorative and they weren’t chosen. They existed so lasers could meet in the right place, so radiation could go where it was meant to go and nowhere else. They are practical marks, functional, unremarkable—unless you know what they were for.

Lying on that table, stripped down, arms aching, holding my breath on command, the world really did feel far away. Normal life existed somewhere beyond the thick lead lined walls. Time shrank to appointments. Days were measured in managing fatigue and recovering from chemo. My body became something that was positioned and repositioned, handled with kindness and efficiency, by people who did it every day.

Those dots are coordinates. Evidence that my body has been mapped and fixed in space. Proof that at one point my entire existence narrowed to a few centimetres of flesh and a machine that hummed and clicked and revolved around me.

But if you change perspective the dots could be something as big as a planet..

That’s what I like about them now. They hold two truths at once. Up close, they are about vulnerability, fear, and survival. From far away, they can be reimagined as something expansive. The world, reduced to a dot.

Cancer creates distance—from who you were before, from who you assumed you would be, from the idea that your body will simply remain intact and keep working because it always has. But it also gives you an aerial view of your own life. You see what matters. You see how small some things really are and how big and important other things are.

I will carry my tattoos for the rest of my life. They may fade or blur, but they won’t disappear. And I don’t want them to. They mark a time when the world felt very far away—and the slow, quiet work of finding my way back.

So if I am ever asked if I have any tattoos, I will still say “Yes, of the world from far away.”

Because in a way, that’s exactly what they are.