At A Glance Author lina Contact lina@bme.anon When Six months ago Artist James H. Studio Fatty's Custom Tattoos Location Washington D.C. I want to begin from the beginning, so the title of my tale will not reveal itself until the end. I was new to tattoos, and they to me. We met in various places. First from a distance, a stranger walking a few feet in front of me, the very edge of his tattoo peeking from under the collar of his shirt. Curious enough I was, but only curious.
Soon I became very close to tattoos. I found one on the soft curve of my lover's lower back, my hand running down her spine touching her skin for the first time, electric fingertips detecting the topography of a design. This discovery then prompted me to wonder if other people I saw clothed had hidden works under their skin.
Now almost five years later, I sometimes run my fingers over my first tattoo, out of sight on my lower back, I trace its shape with delicate touch, a star. It is small, half-dollar in size, outlined in a thin teal line, colored yellow.
It is a gold star for my future husband Zuriel, who needed someone to recognize his accomplishments. "I just wish someone would give me gold star," he said to me one day, talking about how everyone who has and still cares for him never really appreciated his achievements because they are of being an artist, bike courier, rock-climber. That is who he wants to be and I love who he is. So he came with me to Fatty's in D.C. knowing that I was about to get a tattoo for him. This scared him. The procedure, i.e. pain, scared me.
James drew my star; we played around with the size, talked about colors, and decided on placement. Having already visited Fatty's for a septum piercing, I felt comfortable there, but I could not stop sweating. It started while I was finalizing the size, and I think throughout the entire process, I sweated more then I do during running. I was not embarrassed, I thought of it as my skin preparing for a life-transforming experience.
And it was.
I'm not going to go into depth about how uncomfortable it was. I think that it was that way because it was a sensation completely new to me and I could not see it being done. I twitched some, almost causing James to mess-up, and spent the remaining short time it took to complete making noises that my boyfriend thought only he could produce from me. While James was giving me the tattoo, I was seated cross-legged, somewhat leaning to the right, my torso over my legs. Zuriel was at the head of the table, holding my arms, our heads touching. He is the love of my life.
By the time it was over, the pain sensation undulated into the high I feel when I'm a hundred feet up a climb looking out over the expansive view or the sensation my body experiences two miles into a run. Those natural highs amaze me after spending ten years of my life chasing so many highs of unnatural kinds. Those ten years of drug-use and now my experience re-learning how to feel and see the world without those kinds of highs is why I'm getting my next tattoo.
The ink of that tattoo is my decision to not use drugs. And for as long as its part of me, those drugs that I used and sometimes abused, will never be. Just as my first tattoo, the star, is my way of showing Zuriel how proud I am of who he is, my tattoo will prove to me and everyone who sees it, how much I want to be clean.
The idea of a tattoo to represent my coming clean came to me after I got my star, the way it became a part of me; its permanence. I had the how, but not the what. I was scared that I would not be able to come up with a design that would represent what I wanted, a new me. Then I thought about what I was going to do by coming clean. I was going to shed that old skin, and become new. Like the cicada Zuriel and I watched one night, all night, slowly coming out of its shedding skin. The fragile insect's new skin glistened in the moonlight, wet and alive. The shell of the old skin remained on our tent until the wind blew it away. And somewhere that cicada was living again, in a way, new.
I am giving birth to this process, of learning to experience all kinds of days without drugs. I am learning to see with new eyes, the things I thought I would only notice if I were high; feel the things I thought I would only feel if I were high. This is why I am going to have a pixie-insect emerging from a shell of her former self, carved into my back, with the ink to seal the biggest promise I have ever made to myself.
I do not know know when I will get the tattoo. My friend Rat is working on a design with me. I chose her when I was paging through her sketchbook, the first day I met her. I had only just met her but knew that there was a reason her sketchbook ended up in my hands. I asked, and she said that she would design it for me.
The meaning of this tattoo is of a process, so I am allowing the design of it to be one too. I can't even begin to think about or even try to describe to you what getting it will be like. It will hurt, all of it, the physical part of it, and all the other parts, like letting go of something you have come to rely on, you have used to enhance, you have used to forget. Choosing not to use drugs does not mean I think that they are wrong or that people that use them are wrong, I just want to experience my life from now on without them, without that skin...and soon it will all be under my skin, forever.