So this had me in a choke hold, and I needed to express more thoughts.
Something about the position of the tattoo - it's a little hard to tell because of her hair and the way they've used makeup to show her age, but her tattoo appears to be positioned directly over her carotid artery.
Life without parole. - We know many inmates take their own lives. While I don't have exact stats, severing the carotid has significantly higher fatality rates than severing the radial. While identifying the carotid can be done without looking at it, generally people choosing to harm themselves in such a manner do it where they can see either the act or the result.
Eva's tattoo positioned directly over -that- particularly artery is symbolically horrifying and tear-jerking on multiple levels.
We don't know when exactly she was arrested, or why, or even under what charges. Kidnapping Grace, drugging him, and hurling him unconscious onto an unrecoverable suicide mission; sure, those are all reasons to get a life sentence. We also know the world's governments would have loved a convenient scapegoat to show stomping on their glass ceiling - pin Antarctica on her, pin every hard and horrible decision that had to be made onto someone who's already going down for one. Brutal, but efficient. She'd have understood, possibly even approved.
NOW - Breaking out of prison - badass move all on its own. Breaking out of prison to continue saving the physical world, and as many of the humans living on it as possible - more badass! By the time you add in that’s she’s doing all this while on the lam, with contacts of unknown political and criminal status, Eva Stratt has become a fascinatingly weird combination of James Bond and Tony Stark, achieving things that physically and politically should not be possible. Getting a tattoo just to commemorate this would be completely understandable on its own, fair play to her honestly.
HOWEVER. Their is a second party at play.
Because Eva Stratt subjected Ryland Grace to a life sentence without parole, and she knows it. She knew it as she did it.
There was only the slimmest possible chance the crew would even survive the journey, get there intact after 11yrs travel in deep space, actually identify and solve the astrophage problem, and successfully communicate all that back to earth. Hail Mary indeed.
Grace was ultimately sent to die on a ship he couldn’t escape, that held a means for two the other two crew-mates to commit suicide by a method of their choosing. I’m absolutely positive Stratt would have made sure there was either a kind and/or fun means for Grace to depart life as well (shout-out to Ilyukhina who was going to go out with a bang blitzed on vodka and a heroin high) - but Grace didn’t get to choose. His final moments awake on earth, he was trying, desperately, with everything he had to choose the opposite, and escape the fate laid out before him.
Whose sentence is Eva’s tattoo representing?
