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A flower for a murdered father. A crown for a lost husband. Two wolves for a best friend killed in action. Fruit trees, like the ones that hid fleeing festival-goers. 

These were among the more than 100 images tattooed onto the bodies of Oct. 7 survivors by volunteers with a project called Healing Ink.

Northern California tattoo artists Jill “Horiyuki” Bonny and Britton McFetridge were among the 20 volunteers from around the world who traveled to Israel in July to offer their services for free. Healing Ink, whose mission is to “cover the scars of those affected by mass violence,” is a project of Artists 4 Israel, a nonprofit that aims to counter the “spread of anti-Israel bigotry through art.” Celebrity tattoo artist Ami James, who is Israeli, also volunteered with the group.

Bonny said that when her friend Yoni Zilber, an Israeli tattooer, told her about the opportunity to volunteer, her answer was an automatic “yes.”

“Especially since Oct. 7, I feel like a lot of us have sort of awakened our passion for our Jewish identities. So when he explained that they were going to Israel to tattoo survivors of the massacres on Oct. 7, I just said, ‘Tell me when and I’ll go.’” 

Bonny owns and operates Studio Kazoku near Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

The group tattooed 129 people in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem over three days, including survivors of the Nova music festival and the kibbutzim along the Gaza border, as well as relatives of hostages taken that day by Hamas.

“Having the opportunity to go over there and really just do anything to help anybody was so meaningful to me because I feel like a lot of times it’s not about what you’re doing, it’s just about showing up,” Bonny said. “This afforded us the opportunity to just show up, to go there and see things firsthand, to hug people, to just let them know that there are people outside of Israel that are praying for them and that are thinking about them. It was so monumentally important for me to go.”

Bonny notes that although a tattoo may seem frivolous to some, especially in the context of trauma and terrorism, “it is something that can transform people physically, spiritually and emotionally.”

McFetridge has seen the same in his work.

“It’s a big part of our business,” said McFetridge, who owns two Royal Peacock Tattoo shops in Sacramento. “People get stuff to remember, a memorial tattoo for somebody that they lost, or a significant time in their life.”

In McFetridge’s experience, people who are hurting emotionally often find joy and confidence through tattoos because of the mind-body connection, and that altering one’s appearance can also alter the psyche and sense of self.

“People just want to feel better about themselves,” he said. “They want to like the way they look. They want to have something that they like that they get permanently” on their bodies.

Healing Ink was founded in Israel in 2016 and has since facilitated hundreds of tattoos for those affected by violence and terrorism, both at home and abroad. Its guiding philosophy is that people can find therapeutic relief through tattooing by transforming emotional trauma into physical pain, turning it into something tangible and beautiful. As people seek to turn scars into stories, tattoos can become powerful instruments of self-empowerment and connection, weaving together art, emotion and healing in a deeply personal tapestry, according to Healing Ink’s mission statement. 

The organization has also hosted sessions in the U.S., including for survivors the 2016 Pulse nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, the 2017 Harvest Music Festival mass shooting in Las Vegas and of the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue mass shooting in Pittsburgh.

Healing Ink’s next U.S. event is scheduled for Nov. 11 for those affected by the 2018 mass shooting at the Borderline Bar and Grill in Thousand Oaks.

Much of the focus of Oct. 7 has been on the 1,200 people killed by Hamas and the 251 taken hostage into Gaza. But hundreds of thousands of Israelis throughout the country are at risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder, according to one study.

“The first tattoo I did was a sunflower, and it was on this girl whose father died during the attack. He sacrificed himself to save the family,” McFetridge said. “I wasn’t really trying to pry. If they wanted to open up to me, that was fine, but we really didn’t talk much about their experiences. It was really heavy stuff, and they’re just kind of trying to get through the tattoo, so I was trying to make it as easy as possible.”

McFetridge, who is Catholic, didn’t just give tattoos on the trip to Israel. He also received one. Jerusalem is home to the oldest continuously running tattoo studio in the world, owned and operated by the Razzouk family, which has been inking tattoos on Christian pilgrims during their journeys to the Holy Land since the 1300s. McFetridge got a small Jerusalem cross to mark his journey and to remember his experience with Healing Ink.

Jewish law forbids tattoos based on Leviticus 19:28: “You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves: I am the Lord.” But Bonny said she believes that the community’s attitude toward tattoos has drastically changed in recent years — and that the worlds of tattooing and Judaism are not that far apart.

“Something very unique to Jewish culture is that it’s an extraordinarily academic religion, and we’re always reinventing ourselves. We’re always studying and debating our Scriptures,” she said. “I mean, that’s what Shabbat is really for, right?”

Bonny grew up in a “highly educated Conservative Jewish family” in New York and was close with her grandparents who had survived the Holocaust. She went to religious school and Jewish summer camp, celebrated her bat mitzvah and had what she describes as a “typical” Jewish upbringing.

Her journey into tattooing was, perhaps, less typical. She began performing as a contortionist at the Coney Island Sideshow in Brooklyn as a way to pay her bills while attending art college at Cooper Union. Through her circus connections she found herself working an event in Vienna. It was there that she met an artist named Spider Webb, with whom she would eventually apprentice and begin her career.

“I immediately gravitated toward the Japanese style because it’s the most difficult to learn and it’s extremely academic,” Bonny explained. “My grandpa Herbie was always my biggest fan, and I felt like it was because I chose Japanese tattooing, something that was so hard to learn about, so hard to study and practice. That is part of my Jewish identity and feels to me very congruent with how I was raised.”

Bonny received the title “Horiyuki” from Master Horiyoshi III of Yokohama in 2008. Bonny is the first non-Japanese woman to receive this honor, she said. She has written several books about the history of Japanese tattooing and lectured at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Japanese American Museum in Los Angeles and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.

One of the tattoos Bonny did with Healing Ink was a koi fish for a DJ named Eli, who had attended the Nova festival.

“We still chat online, just to check in on him,” she said. “I think that growing up in the Holocaust survivor community, I felt a lot of parallels. There’s just this sense of knowing among the survivors that bound them together.”

Another tattoo Bonny gave was a large pink flower for a young mom named Yaara. She told Bonny that she and her husband had moved away from their kibbutz near Gaza before Oct. 7. She’d been volunteering at her daughter’s preschool one day and heard the sound of rockets. One of the preschoolers grabbed her hand and said, “Don’t worry, it’s ours.” After that, Yaara moved her immediate family north, but ended up losing her father and a lot of her extended family on that same kibbutz on Oct. 7.

The last tattoo Bonny did on the trip was for a former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces still dealing with trauma. She inked a Japanese-style phoenix, rising from the ashes.

“Being able to give this gift,” Bonny said of the effort overall, “was a huge honor for me.”

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