it's been four years
Feb. 21st, 2005 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bryiarrosetoday marked four years that i've had my tattoo.
it was actually four whole years ago that i sat there in the baltimore tattoo museum while george (he's the one in the front holding the... pig?) inked onto the small of my back the design we'd come up with together.
last year, in the memoir class i took, i wrote about getting my tattoo. it ended up as a central piece of my large work for the course, which i don't think anyone but jane ever read the whole of... but tonight there's something i want to say about all this. about the ink under my skin, about the way time passes. the way our memories work. that year was full of tuesdays. this year is full of days. really, i'm not sure that i can find the words tonight--still somewhat sick with whatever i have that's been morphing day to day, i'm drained to say the least. and so, though i might change my mind and lock it or move it later, here's the section from that memoir, and my tattoo to go with it.
***
Some time before that there was a morning where I woke up and knew I was going to get a tattoo. I hadn’t really contemplated it before then, but when I woke that day it was like an inevitability dropped into my mind. I knew where it was going, I knew what it would mean. I browsed designs and doodled. Checked out local tattoo parlors. Saved up my tips.
On Valentine’s Day, instead of celebrating a foolishly commercial holiday, S. and I went to the market in Federal Hill for sushi. We balked at the infinitely winding lines of men waiting to buy flowers, and smugly agreed we were right not to buy into that headache. We ordered our usual $20 of sushi, and watched the passers-by while we ate at the counter. The stand next to us sold its tubs of beer and the stand behind it, perfect deep fried catfish. The wine and cheese vendors had lines of harried husbands and boyfriends trailing from them as well.
The sinking feeling wouldn’t leave my stomach that night, and I ate noticeably less than my usual share. My appetite protesting the realization that these happy nights were nearing their end.
Driving home I convinced S. to stop at the Baltimore Tattoo Museum with me. We parked on a sketchy side street and made sure to lock the car. Entering the small white stucco building on the corner, we were greeted by the buzzing of a needle and the slightly antiseptic smell most tattoo parlors seem to have.
I recognized a few of the artists as regulars at Café Hon, and began to piece together the recommendations I’d received. We meandered through the museum displays, glass cases held examples of antique equipment for tattooing, and photos and articles detailing their history surrounded them. In the same large room hung swinging displays of ready-made designs. We looked through them, at the hula girls and butterflies, and then through some of the photo albums with work by each tattoo artist. Nowhere did I find the image in my head. I hung around the front counter and waited for one of the besieged artists to notice me.
I tried to explain to the young guy who finally helped me the significance of the star I wanted. My soul’s star. The star of my heart. Direction and passion and love and an absolute surety of purpose. He tried to sketch for me and came up with clichéd designs like the ones on the walls and stars that were too brittle, black and white. When he gave up, I was finally passed along to George.
George, in the middle of his dinner, he told me to come back Saturday. That then he’d do a sketch for me—if he was in. Come Saturday, when I returned, we talked and joked and he sketched out the picture in my head. Either I articulated it better, or he just understood what I was getting at, but when he suggested using a compass rose I was sold.
All in all, George was bizarre. 40-ish and balding with pierced ears and ink down his arms—a near trademark of tattoo artists. He complained sarcastically about take-out food and people and when he quoted the price of what I wanted done he told me he was giving me a deal.
“Because we’ve kind of gotten to be friends through this and I like you,” he said. I think he was on something that night.
But I came back Wednesday night, reminded him of who I was and repeated the quoted price. George photocopied my design onto the transfer—it ended up larger than I’d originally envisioned it, but alright nonetheless—and took me into the small room where I would have the work done.
Behind the drawn-back curtain stood a chair—black vinyl and chrome—I ended up sitting backwards on it, and holding tight to the handle bars. I’d worn overalls so the small of my back would be easy to expose, and a barrette with ducks in my hair for courage. S. came with me and alternately watched, while I bit my lip and tried not to squirm or squeal, or sat on a bench in the hall writing in the journal I’d bought him long before we were together.
He rarely wrote in that journal. This was a moment for him as well. Later, I shamefully admit, I peeked at what he’d been writing.
I’ve wanted this for so long.
He’d wanted me for so long, wanted us. And now he had it and wouldn’t make it work. But there at the bottom of my spine a piece our history was sewn under my skin. The beautiful scar that love had written over the face of our lives, was inked through me now for the world to see.
Since our bodies have such a limited memory for physical pain, the two hours or so I spent sweating through the adrenaline rush blur for me now. I remember a mirror on the wall I faced in which I watched my self grimace and, angled, the quiet look on S.’s face in the hall. The room was brightly lit, white painted walls with personality tacked over the top. The colored bottles of ink lining a shelf high on the wall and other shelves with books on art and tattoos piled haphazardly on them.
Yet the buzzing of the needle remains crystal clear in my mind’s ear. The anticipation when it is switched on and first buzzes, while you wait for it to press into your skin, not knowing what kind of sensation to expect. Tattooing feels different to everyone. Pain or pleasure or a mix of both or neither… for many people it becomes an addiction. For me, my tattoo is merely a physicalization of my true addiction. And the details of that pain blur a little more each day as well.
The needle sewing ink through the layers of my skin seared and burned, the strong black outlines the worst of it. The last line of the star George drew remains slightly crooked, testament to my inability to bear the sensation quite as long as necessary. The colors layered on afterwards felt more like scraping and scribbling, a less precise and more bearable truth.
Finally, a compass rose—a star with sixteen points in dark blues and purples with a red heart set in the center. A design I would never come to regret, never could regret, any more than I could regret the events and emotions that placed it there.
S. and I held each other in bed that night and talked very little. Both of us overtly aware of the gauze taped over my back and lost in thought. Eventually I slept and in the morning when I woke, sat up quickly. Immediately I felt the scabbing stretch and pinch at my skin and froze in mid-movement at the pain. It would be weeks before the scarring fully healed, and far longer before I would.
***
it was actually four whole years ago that i sat there in the baltimore tattoo museum while george (he's the one in the front holding the... pig?) inked onto the small of my back the design we'd come up with together.
last year, in the memoir class i took, i wrote about getting my tattoo. it ended up as a central piece of my large work for the course, which i don't think anyone but jane ever read the whole of... but tonight there's something i want to say about all this. about the ink under my skin, about the way time passes. the way our memories work. that year was full of tuesdays. this year is full of days. really, i'm not sure that i can find the words tonight--still somewhat sick with whatever i have that's been morphing day to day, i'm drained to say the least. and so, though i might change my mind and lock it or move it later, here's the section from that memoir, and my tattoo to go with it.
 |
Some time before that there was a morning where I woke up and knew I was going to get a tattoo. I hadn’t really contemplated it before then, but when I woke that day it was like an inevitability dropped into my mind. I knew where it was going, I knew what it would mean. I browsed designs and doodled. Checked out local tattoo parlors. Saved up my tips.
On Valentine’s Day, instead of celebrating a foolishly commercial holiday, S. and I went to the market in Federal Hill for sushi. We balked at the infinitely winding lines of men waiting to buy flowers, and smugly agreed we were right not to buy into that headache. We ordered our usual $20 of sushi, and watched the passers-by while we ate at the counter. The stand next to us sold its tubs of beer and the stand behind it, perfect deep fried catfish. The wine and cheese vendors had lines of harried husbands and boyfriends trailing from them as well.
The sinking feeling wouldn’t leave my stomach that night, and I ate noticeably less than my usual share. My appetite protesting the realization that these happy nights were nearing their end.
Driving home I convinced S. to stop at the Baltimore Tattoo Museum with me. We parked on a sketchy side street and made sure to lock the car. Entering the small white stucco building on the corner, we were greeted by the buzzing of a needle and the slightly antiseptic smell most tattoo parlors seem to have.
I recognized a few of the artists as regulars at Café Hon, and began to piece together the recommendations I’d received. We meandered through the museum displays, glass cases held examples of antique equipment for tattooing, and photos and articles detailing their history surrounded them. In the same large room hung swinging displays of ready-made designs. We looked through them, at the hula girls and butterflies, and then through some of the photo albums with work by each tattoo artist. Nowhere did I find the image in my head. I hung around the front counter and waited for one of the besieged artists to notice me.
I tried to explain to the young guy who finally helped me the significance of the star I wanted. My soul’s star. The star of my heart. Direction and passion and love and an absolute surety of purpose. He tried to sketch for me and came up with clichéd designs like the ones on the walls and stars that were too brittle, black and white. When he gave up, I was finally passed along to George.
George, in the middle of his dinner, he told me to come back Saturday. That then he’d do a sketch for me—if he was in. Come Saturday, when I returned, we talked and joked and he sketched out the picture in my head. Either I articulated it better, or he just understood what I was getting at, but when he suggested using a compass rose I was sold.
All in all, George was bizarre. 40-ish and balding with pierced ears and ink down his arms—a near trademark of tattoo artists. He complained sarcastically about take-out food and people and when he quoted the price of what I wanted done he told me he was giving me a deal.
“Because we’ve kind of gotten to be friends through this and I like you,” he said. I think he was on something that night.
But I came back Wednesday night, reminded him of who I was and repeated the quoted price. George photocopied my design onto the transfer—it ended up larger than I’d originally envisioned it, but alright nonetheless—and took me into the small room where I would have the work done.
Behind the drawn-back curtain stood a chair—black vinyl and chrome—I ended up sitting backwards on it, and holding tight to the handle bars. I’d worn overalls so the small of my back would be easy to expose, and a barrette with ducks in my hair for courage. S. came with me and alternately watched, while I bit my lip and tried not to squirm or squeal, or sat on a bench in the hall writing in the journal I’d bought him long before we were together.
He rarely wrote in that journal. This was a moment for him as well. Later, I shamefully admit, I peeked at what he’d been writing.
He’d wanted me for so long, wanted us. And now he had it and wouldn’t make it work. But there at the bottom of my spine a piece our history was sewn under my skin. The beautiful scar that love had written over the face of our lives, was inked through me now for the world to see.
Since our bodies have such a limited memory for physical pain, the two hours or so I spent sweating through the adrenaline rush blur for me now. I remember a mirror on the wall I faced in which I watched my self grimace and, angled, the quiet look on S.’s face in the hall. The room was brightly lit, white painted walls with personality tacked over the top. The colored bottles of ink lining a shelf high on the wall and other shelves with books on art and tattoos piled haphazardly on them.
Yet the buzzing of the needle remains crystal clear in my mind’s ear. The anticipation when it is switched on and first buzzes, while you wait for it to press into your skin, not knowing what kind of sensation to expect. Tattooing feels different to everyone. Pain or pleasure or a mix of both or neither… for many people it becomes an addiction. For me, my tattoo is merely a physicalization of my true addiction. And the details of that pain blur a little more each day as well.
The needle sewing ink through the layers of my skin seared and burned, the strong black outlines the worst of it. The last line of the star George drew remains slightly crooked, testament to my inability to bear the sensation quite as long as necessary. The colors layered on afterwards felt more like scraping and scribbling, a less precise and more bearable truth.
Finally, a compass rose—a star with sixteen points in dark blues and purples with a red heart set in the center. A design I would never come to regret, never could regret, any more than I could regret the events and emotions that placed it there.
S. and I held each other in bed that night and talked very little. Both of us overtly aware of the gauze taped over my back and lost in thought. Eventually I slept and in the morning when I woke, sat up quickly. Immediately I felt the scabbing stretch and pinch at my skin and froze in mid-movement at the pain. It would be weeks before the scarring fully healed, and far longer before I would.
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