I first noticed a tattoo when the vet came to visit our dog one day. She bent down to examine his paws (he had arthritis) and as she did so her ponytail slid to one side and exposed the nape of her neck. Into the skin, a tiny red star was sitting, so secret and beautiful that I felt the first stab of 'maybe I should do that!' I was fourteen, so getting a tattoo was completely out of the question, and after a while I forgot about it.
At A Glance Author Jupiter Contact Jupiter@bme.anon When Five years ago Artist Myself Studio Home The first time I seriously thought about getting a tattoo, I was sitting in the back of a huge old 4x4 rolling through Zimbabwe sitting with the friend I'd grown up with. I'd just come back to Zimbabwe for my 16th birthday, and it was the first time we'd seen each other since my family had suddenly (and seemingly randomly...I didn't understand politics at the time) left the country.
We were talking about what I would have got up to had I gone to boarding school with her, and to my utter horror, she pulled the hem of her skirt down and showed me a spiral pattern tattooed into her skin. It was blue and patchy, and I had never seen a tattoo like it – it suddenly dawned on me that she'd done it herself. It was to my eyes, beautiful, though thinking back to it now I can remember it looking just as if she'd drawn on herself in biro. Essentially, she had - she explained how she did it with a compass and a pen, stabbing herself so many times that she drove the ink deep enough to stay there. This only happened in a few places though, and the colour was far from solid – it was patchy and broken, and looked aged and weathered. I can remember thinking that it looked just like tribal paintings on rocks, or something similarly romantic. She got bored of the topic, and moved on. Over the rest of the trip, I forgot about it.
About six months later, when I'd been back in England for a while and was starting to wish I was back in Africa again, I remembered the tattoo. I also remembered the vets tattoo, and for the first time in years started wanting one again. I spent ages researching tribal designs, designing my own, drawing patterns, all the while lamenting that I was only 16 and I couldn't get one done professionally. I wasn't a stranger to self decorating, however and one night I got up on a whim and decided I was going to give myself one. I chose a design that was a curved leaf with bubbles up one side and drew it on my hip. Then I got a needle from a sewing kit I'd bought some years previously to pierce my ears, and 'sterilised' it by burning it in a match. I got a permanent marker, drew over the design on my skin, and pricked it as many times as I could stand. It bled, wiped the blood away, drew over it again, and followed the same process.
It took me about four hours to finish. At the end, I decided that I didn't actually like the design, so I got a toothbrush and I proceeded to try scrub most of it out. I managed to get most of it off, and what was left I couldn't bring myself to try remove. The whole area was raw, sticky and bloody, and I couldn't wear tight clothes or anything that even vaguely touched it. I covered it up in bandages and tried to forget about it. There was no way I could tell anyone else about what I'd done, especially not my parents, so I had to try handle it myself.
I tried to treat it with antiseptic cream, salt water, normal water, but in the end it was least sore when I left it alone. After three agony filled weeks of septic wound, flaking skin and general pain, most of the design had come out, but what remained was a perfect little circle on my left hip and some hideous scarring. I would never, ever do it again, and strongly urge nobody else to try it. There are several dangers that I know about now that would have put me off if I had known about them at the time and meant I couldn't even get the tip of the needle near my skin. Septicaemia is one of those I would be most scared about now.
The scarring has faded, and over time I've come to love the tat, but I will never get rid of the discoloured skin that tells the story itself. I'm planning to get more tattoos over it to remove the full impact of the scars, and having had several professional tattoos now my advice is do your research, and wait till you're old enough that you don't take matters, and possibly your life, into your own hands.