World
Tattoos Ease Pain for Bataclan Survivors
Survivors of the Bataclan attack in Paris have used tattoos to cope with the trauma.
Like dozens of other survivors of the Nov. 13, 2015 attack at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, Laura Leveque got herself tattooed. "I was soaked in blood and flesh. The dead seeped into me," she said. Two years after the attack she still feels "in limbo" - to get her "body back and transform the horror into something beautiful."
Ruben who spent six months in the hospital had the motto of Paris, "Fluctuat nec mergitur" (battered but not sunk), which became a defiant slogan after the attacks, tattooed on his arm.
"Without having a big sign saying, 'I was at the Bataclan,' I wanted to mark it," he said.
"It was Friday the 13th, there were 13 of us in the mosh pit in front of the stage, and we all got out alive," recalled Ludmila Profit who had the number tattooed inside a clover leaf behind her ear.
She added a musical note and a profanity, "to say 'F--- the terrorists,'" to show her pride and defiance "at being able to live for those who are no longer here," she said.
Three months after she survived the slaughter, Nahomy Beuchet had the date of the attack tattooed on the inside of her arm along with "Peace, Love, Death Metal," the title of an album by Eagles of Death Metal, the Californian band performing at the Bataclan.
"This is my scar," says Manon Hautecoeur of her lion tattoo and the Paris motto "Fluctuat nec mergitur."
"When you are 'only' psychologically hurt you feel you are not a victim because you were not physically injured," said Hautecoeur who was close to the Petit Cambodge restaurant when it was sprayed with bullets in one of the drive-by attacks by jihadists that night.