NEW YORK — In December 2000, Omer Golan was waiting for a bus at the Mehola Junction in the West Bank, winning a backgammon game, when a suicide bomber grabbed him from behind and detonated 15 pounds of explosives laced with nails and old bullets.

Golan, a 20-year-old soldier at the time, woke up three weeks later at Haifa’s Rambam Hospital in critical condition. Shrapnel was embedded in his flesh, he was partially paralyzed and mostly deaf, and burns covered his skin, scorching off most of a tattoo depicting a dolphin on his back, leaving only the dolphin’s head.

The charred tattoo’s remnant confused the medical staff taking care of him, who kept asking why he had a “beheaded bird” on his shoulder, he said.

When Golan later moved to Brooklyn, a friend who was a tattoo artist inked a bird’s body onto the dolphin’s head, a nod to the staff’s misconception about the design and one of a series of tattoos he has acquired in response to his injuries.

Where his watch melted into his wrist, he tattooed the word “Now,” because “that’s the time,” he said. On his right forearm, over his scars, he inked the phrase, “Bread and circuses,” an economics term which he takes to mean “extravagant pleasure,” a riposte against attempts to amputate the limb after the attack.

Golan is still recovering from the attack — a 9-millimeter bullet that had embedded in his forearm, entangled in his nerves and muscles, is slowly emerging from his skin 26 years later, just below his “Bread and circuses” tattoo.

And on Thursday, he got his latest tattoo, showing three hearts, connected by veins and laced with lines of gold. The design was inspired by the Japanese art of Kinsugi, in which pottery is smashed, then reassembled, the cracks mended with gold lacquer, instead of concealed.

“It’s a metaphor for things that are being broken and reassembled and healed. When it’s healed, it’s more valuable, more beautiful than it was when it was new,” said Golan, an artist himself. “I’ve definitely been broken and reassembled in so many different ways.”

Golan got the hearts tattoo during an event by Healing Ink, an advocacy group that provides free tattoos to the victims of terrorism and their family members. The event illustrated the long-lasting and far-reaching trauma wrought by Middle East violence, and a counterintuitive method some have used to cope.

Healing Ink holds yearly events in Israel and in at least one US city per year. Its last event in New York was in 2017, for survivors of the 9/11 attack and the families of victims. In 2021, the group offered tattoos to those afflicted by the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh.

Craig Dershowitz, the head of Healing Ink, said tattoos help by allowing the survivors to “claim the personal narrative.”

“When you’ve had some scar put on you, it’s been inflicted by someone outside of you. It means your body and your mindset of who you are have been taken over by an outsider,” said Dershowitz, a Brooklyn-born, Los Angeles-based, tattoo-covered Jew.

“What a tattoo does, both physically and emotionally, is restates, ‘This is who I am. I’ve chosen what my body looks like. I’ve chosen what’s been done to me and my body.’ It reclaims personal agency,” he said.

There is some research backing up the hypothesis.

Some terror victims are hesitant to commit to therapy, but more comfortable getting tattooed with other survivors, giving them an entry point into seeking mental health support, said Dershowitz, who has the word “Love” inked on his left eyelid, and “you” on the right.

Thursday’s event was held in partnership with the American Friends of Natal, the US wing of an Israeli nonprofit for trauma victims.

“The trauma survivor, they almost reset their life. They need to take control over doing the little things, like waking up, making your own breakfast, making your own choices,” said Maayan Aviv, the director of American Friends of Natal. “A tattoo is something of reclaiming your body, but also, I believe, having that memory of the strength you had to reclaim your body be with you permanently.”

“Tattoos are not for everyone, but the people that it does help, I believe it makes an immense difference,” she said.

The tattoo itself is just one part of a broader process. Healing Ink provides access to therapists, survivors collaborate with artists to design their tattoos, and afterward, participants are connected to a wider community of people who have shared similar experiences.

At Wednesday’s event, the mood was upbeat, with participants chatting with each other and the organizers, and getting to know the tattooists.

Some participants feel that the physical pain, coupled with the therapeutic environment, is cathartic, Dershowitz said. Participants sometimes weep during the process.

“Your internal pain that you can’t express comes externally because you’re getting jabbed by a needle. Sometimes it has that ability of taking away this pain because you couldn’t vocalize it,” he said. “Your body is like, ‘Okay, I’m translating this into an external pain, and you can let it leave your body.’”

At the event, held in a swanky club in downtown Manhattan, 14 tattooists each inked one participant. Three of the tattooists flew in from Israel, while some of the non-Israel artists had participated in previous trips to Israel.

Several family members of former Hamas hostage Edan Alexander were in attendance. Alexander, a native of nearby New Jersey born to an Israeli family, was taken hostage as a soldier during the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. Alexander was released last year and returned to military service.

Alexander’s mother, Yael, discussed a design with one of the artists, but opted to remain with her only two tattoos — the date of the Hamas attack on her arm and a small, cursive letter “E” on her wrist for her son.

In Israel, after the October 2023 Hamas invasion, tattoos emerged as a poignant and widespread method of commemorating loved ones killed in the attack, particularly among survivors of the Supernova massacre. Former hostage Mia Schem, who was kidnapped from Supernova, tattooed “We will dance again” on her arm, next to the date 7.10.23.

Other New York Jews have gotten tattoos commemorating the attack on their own.

The participants at Thursday’s event worked out the designs with the artists. One of Alexander’s relatives inked an abstract, flowing design down her arm and shoulder; another had an ouroboros, a snake eating its tail that represents renewal, wrapped around his ankle. A chef who loves cooking for his wife and two children had a chef’s knife surrounded by three flowers tattooed on his calf.

Shahar Malka, who moved to the city from Israel eight months ago, got a tattoo of an Oriental plane tree, called dolev in Hebrew, to commemorate his cousin, also named Dolev, who was killed fighting in Gaza.

Healing Ink is part of Artists 4 Israel, a nonprofit Dershowitz started in 2009 in response to an anti-Israel outpouring during Operation Cast Lead, a previous conflict in Gaza. Artists 4 Israel has done projects such as having graffiti artists decorate bomb shelters in southern Israel. The group launched Healing Ink in 2016.

“It’s like, ‘How does my little tattoo organization help overcome what everyone has suffered?’” Dershowitz said. “But what I then feel elated by is talking to these people after the fact. For them, it does seem to have some impact.”

“To be on the side of seeing it help them gives me this overwhelming joy,” he said. “It at least gives me some sense that, in a tiny way, I’ve got to play some piece in their healing.”

For Golan, the tattoo is part of a long recovery. He said there were about two dozen bits of shrapnel still in his body, some of which surgeons will attempt to remove during an operation next week.

He had been a musician before the terror attack, but had to give up on music due to hearing loss caused by the blast, and became a successful artist. After he lost several friends at the Supernova party massacre on October 7, he launched his latest venture, an AI foundation called MyWhatIf that aims to help users recover from trauma.

“I lost a bunch of friends on October 7th, and I wanted to do something that helped people,” he said.

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