On the night of October 7, Craig Dershowitz got himself a new tattoo. “Immediately, I just needed something to put out the pain I was feeling,” said the California-based CEO of Artists 4 Israel and Healing Ink. He chose a small broken heart with 10/7 written on it.

Dershowitz launched the Healing Ink project as a way for people to heal their trauma, and has taken several volunteer artists to Israel each year since 2016 to tattoo between 30 and 40 people. But this year was different. This year they tattooed over the scars of four times as many people that they would usually: 129 survivors of the massacre of October 7. Among them were religious men wearing kippot and 70-year-old men and women, Jews and Arabs.

Overcoming trauma: a map of the Nova festival

Recent research, including by Tel Aviv University, has shown that tattooing can help people to overcome emotional trauma, particularly those who aren’t receiving help or who have been resistant to more traditional treatments – for self-harm, or for cosmetic reasons when someone has been injured or had a surgery such as a mastectomy, for example. It can be about taking something horrendous and making it beautiful.

“The overarching theme is a sense of reclaiming your body and feeling at home and at peace with the way you look and with what’s been done to you, because the scar, or whatever it was, was forced upon you, whereas this is now something that you have complete control over,” says Dershowitz.

With those tattooed after October 7, Dershowitz observed several images featuring memories of loved ones passed away. “And there’s a tonne of phoenixes,” he says. “We probably did ten. This idea of rebirth and coming up from the ashes. Each person has their own reason, which is incredible to me because it shows the power of the tattoo, that everyone can relate to it in their own way.”

Videos of those who were tattooed by Artists 4 Israel this year tell stories that are both heartbreaking and empowering. The father whose son was murdered who had never considered a tattoo until the point that his once-steadfast boundaries were shattered, and now has a picture of his son sprinting as his body parts fall off. “I feel the same,” the grieving father says. Or the mother’s chosen image of a brightly coloured lion and three flowers, a symbol of strength and her children blooming “after everything that happened”. Or the Nova survivor’s map of Israel to tell “everybody” the story of what happened at the festival.

To begin the healing process, people are interviewed by trauma-informed specialists. “We only choose those that we feel will benefit from the tattoo, that there’s some sense that a tattoo has a meaning and purpose for them,” says Dershowitz. And then there’s the sense of community and belonging with everyone being tattooed together, in the same place at the same time, which helps them to see that they’re not alone in their suffering, and creates a positive, holistic experience. “Which is very much a part of why and how we do it,” Dershowitz says. “There are moments where people are crying and consoling each other. We’ve had people who were in the same war and injured near to each other and hadn’t met.”

But there were also moments of happiness. The day that they tattooed mostly Nova survivors, music was playing. “People were like, ‘OK, we’re through this pain now, let’s celebrate life.’”

As for tattoos being prohibited in Judaism, Dershowitz points out discussions he had with four rabbis representing Reform, Conservative, Orthodox and Modern Orthodox, all of whom gave their blessing. The abiding reason being pikuach nefesh – to save a life. “If this changes a person’s quality of life in a significant way, then they say it’s allowed.”