Bordeaux - (AFP) - This month, French women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer will be able to turn the page on their suffering with a free artistic tattoo, with the aim of erasing stigma, as part of the "October Rose" initiative to raise awareness of this disease.

"Look at my tattoo," says Nathalie Sogan, 55, admiring her tattoo in the mirror.

The scars from Sugan's surgical removal of both breasts are no longer visible. Those on the left are covered by a painting showing an Asian landscape that includes a waterfall, stones for their "hardness," two koi fish, a species known for its tough conditions, and Mount Fuji in the background.

It took about seven hours of work to complete this tattoo, as a result of which Sugan turned a page from her life that lasted seven years of suffering from cancer. Sugan was diagnosed for the first time with this disease in May 2015, when doctors told her that the infection affected her right breast.

"Cancer is like a tsunami that we face," she says. She underwent her first mastectomy two months after her condition was diagnosed. To hide the effects of the operation, in 2018 she received a tattoo of a tree and a Buddha statue.

Her second breast developed cancer in 2019, and she became angry at having to undergo a second mastectomy and then chemotherapy.

The drawing of the tree and the Buddha statue are now in harmony with the tattoo of the waterfall and Mount Fuji, while the body of the fifty-year-old woman is characterized by this "work of art", which refused a reconstruction of her breasts because she had suffered enough.

As for the tattoo artist, Yale, she believes that tattoos carry many meanings, and she says, "We do not contribute to saving lives on a daily basis, but we help in healing."

Breast cancer is the most common and deadly type of cancer among women worldwide, with 54,000 new infections and more than 12,000 deaths annually recorded in France.

During the first weekend of October, about twenty women decided to undergo a tattoo in a hotel hall in Bordeaux, the first for most of them, Pascal Murray, 67.

"I did not initially support the idea of tattooing. But the October Rose initiative is taking place in my area, and when I learned about Rose Tattoo, I was convinced," she says.

Doctors told Murray when she was 41 years old that she was in the pre-cancerous stage, that is, the stage of detecting cells growing abnormally. The woman underwent a reconstruction operation using her latissimus dorsi muscle, which left scars at the operation site.

And these wounds disappeared under a tattoo of beautiful roses. "This painting adorned a place that was not beautiful," says the sixty-year-old woman.
"I've been told a lot that getting a tattoo is an end to suffering," says Natalie Cade, president of the Sur Danker association behind the initiative. Other tattoo sessions are scheduled to take place in Paris.

Kaede remembers the first time she launched this initiative in 2016, saying, "There were seven tattoo artists for nine women," noting that this low turnout shocked her.

The demand for tattoos has increased annually since 2016. A woman wishing to receive a tattoo must wait “at least one year” after the last surgery she underwent, in addition to submitting a medical statement that she does not object to resorting to this procedure, provided that it does not exceed the date of the three months preceding the day of the initiative.

The tattoo artists, for their part, undergo training to obtain the necessary “technical and medical information” from a specialized surgeon, and thus become familiar with the physical and psychological consequences of cancer.

Sur Danker's goal is to make tattoo art become a healing tool in itself.

Sandrine, who received a tattoo three years ago and came to accompany her close friend, confirms that she no longer sees the effects of cancer, and says, "I no longer talk about what I went through, but only about tattoos."