Sarle' Jeffries

Connect What inspired your most recent tattoo?

My most recent is a talisman with my mother’s thumbprint in the center; it feels like one of the many sacred imprints I have of her love and legacy. When she passed, I had the honor of preparing her body. I took her thumbprints, and gifting them to our family as tokens of remembrance. Several of us chose to carry her print on our flesh in our own way.

If your ink could speak, what would it say?

If my ink could speak, it would say: We spoke for her until she found other ways to be heard. We held her wounds, danced around her scars, and adorned flesh once tainted by trauma—transforming it into beauty. We reminded her that she is both: what she has absorbed and what she now reflects. A canvas of becoming. A story still unfolding.

What would you do with the $25,000?

As a disabled vet and healing artist, I turn trauma into connection. After a recent dog attack abroad left me unable to work, I returned to school for acupuncture. There was a physical and emotional toll that this funding would help with, along with recovery costs. It would also help me expand The Thread of Resilience for military and civilian communities, and offer somatic healing scholarships for a modality like tattoos, Reiki, or Shibari to help others reclaim their bodies and stories.