I keep looking down at my leg and feeling satisfied as I write this. Yesterday I woke up feeling stupid and brave and decided that I would do it. Give myself a tattoo. It's the crappiest tattoo ever but I love it. It's a star. Tiny star on my thing above my knee. It's formed by little dots close to each other, not solid lines. I woke up yesterday morning feeling sick and tired and saw three safety pins in a piece of clothing that I had glued to my closet door (whole different story). I picked out the sharpest looking one and then sat down on the edge of my bed and picked up a black rolling ball pen (i think that's the type) and pulled off the edge. Inside the ink cartiledge is foam soaked in black ink, I guess. I opened the safety pin and stuck inside the pen and pulled it out with black ink on the end and stuck it into my thigh. Now, I have never done anything like this. Although most of my friends mutilate themselves in some way or another, I have never hurt myself in any way that actually broke my skin, even in my worst depression. So this was new and scary. The first dot barely went in. It's weird; in some places it would hurt to even touch the tip of the safety pin to my skin, and in other places, only half an inch away, I would be pushing down and all of a sudden half the pin would be submerged under my skin. It was bizarre. And sometimes I would be pushing down as hard as I could, and just not be able to break through the bottom layer of skin (anybody know what I mean? I could feel layers of skin as I pushed in the pin because I was going so slowly).
At A Glance Author StarryEyed Contact StarryEyed@bme.anon Artist me myself i Studio my bedroom Location my house I had the first line (five lines in all for the star) done when some friend of my parents from New York who was in town came to visit and I had to come downstairs and eat things that I didn't like and drink lemonade with them for three hours and listen to conversation I didn't care about. I was still in my pajama pants and kept pulling the right leg (the leg I was tattooing) up to look at my tattoo under the table. There was only blood coming out of a few of the dots. There was clear liquid coming up from too; don't want to know what that means. It was all very surreal. We talked pleasently and she (my parent's friend) asked me questions that all adults ask about college and such that I don't know the answers too and eventually left. I scurried back upstairs to finish.
I had now lost my stupid and brave mood and it was harder. Now I had gotten to the spot that really hurt for some reason. I got ice and iced the area which would only numbed for about two seconds after I took off the ice. Also, the ink I used washed off with water, so I think that might have led it to be fainter and greyer and all. I was thinking of just leaving it as only three lines (which it was by then) and finishing it later, but I suspected that I would never get around to finishing it if I didn't then. Also I was going to a garage band thing at someone's house and wanted to show it off. So I gritted my teeth and finished as quickly as I could (the dots getting farther and farther spaced as I went on). Some of the dots weren't looking very black so I took a permanant black marker and stuck the safety pin into the tip of that and tried to touch it up a bit. Then I rubbed it off with alcohol and put on a bandaid (larger than normal bandaid) and walked around the house feeling pleased until my friend came and picked me up.
People who knew me well enough to tell me what they really thought were displeased and told me it was stupid and fake looking. Everyone else just sort of went "ooookkkk" and backed away slowly. At least they were all freaks enough themselves not to send me to the hospital anyway. The nicest thing said was by one of my closest friends who knows all about my weird body modification obsessions and said she was proud of me for "braving the needle" as she put it and that she was happy (but still thought it was stupid and looked like shit).
I hope it sticks; I had no clue what I was doing. I've taken a shower since then and it's been twenty four hours and it's still there, but it's faded and some of the holes are a little red and swollen. But I'm still happy because it means so much to me. I feel like with every change I make to myself I become more of the person I want to be.