Elbow tattoos still fucking hurt but the pain doesn't make them meaningful
Earlier this week I got my newest tattoos colored in. Let me tell you, All Reading Eye, it was the most painful thing I have ever experienced. Seeing stars. Time dilation. Jumping feet-first into an event horizon and repeatedly wondering "how did I end up here, at this exact place, being stabbed by this many needles this many times for this long." There was no Dana. Only Zuul.
YET — I am Quite Pleased with the results. Quick refresher: each band, starting at my wrist, marks a major life event roughly in chronological order. The sleeve, when finished, will be a tattoo life timeline.
Tattoos, in order, with very brief descriptions
Worth noting: the bear paw dead center was my first tattoo, inked well before I'd conceived of the sleeve at all. One more continuity problem my artist has deftly solved.
- Wolf paw prints in a purple band — a nod to an early fascination with wolves
- Two red bears — "Two Bears," a name given to me by an indigenous friend in Arizona
- Black band with a small light window — the very depressed years in high school
- Blue/yellow stripes — start of college, Beloit's team colors
- Sulphur atom and benzene rings — a chemistry project that ended with me dropping the major and getting a professor fired
- "A beast I am lest a beast I become," in Gallifreyan — for the community, and the self, I found at Beloit
- "Minuet" sound wave — a cut of the refrain from my first long-term partner's senior recital
- A second set of blue/yellow stripes to close out college
- Abstracted accessibility icon — a nod to the 22-year career in accessibility I've built at my current job, which has been incredibly rewarding
- Fuchsia rope — the first batch dyed and sold under Bunny Rope, my 30s side-hustle
- Canon-styled camera rings — I'm a Nikon shooter, my wife shoots Canon, and it remains the single biggest rift in our marriage after all these years
- Shutter at roughly f/6 — still just an outline, but cameras are cool
Bonus tattoo list: the bear paw noted above, plus a trash-polka-styled Cthulhu on my back, for a grand total of 14(!) tattoos.
The accessibility icon
Of the whole set, the abstracted accessibility icon is my favorite — and I think my artist, Marc of Darkmatter Tattoo, did a bang-up job designing it. It isn't the most personally meaningful piece on my arm. It's just objectively cool.
I never set out to work in accessibility. It happened the way most interesting things in my life happen: I keep it interesting on purpose. Every year I pick a them via a word to organize some piece of self-improvement around — and I build a small set of "rules" to force decisions in its direction. Past years have run: focus, community (the COVID year, which in hindsight is very funny), reinvigoration, hope.
2012 was "metamorphosis." One of the skills on the docket was public speaking. I was becoming more visible in my role, which meant more reasons to talk to large groups of people, and I firmly believe presenting well is one of the more reliable levers for growing a career. So the rule became: do not turn down opportunities to speak in front of groups.
Literally the next week — January 2012 — I got a call from a developer on our infrastructure team asking if I'd be willing to teach the entire division about accessible development, that March.
Fourteen years later and fourteen tattoos later, I'm head of accessibility for a multibillion-dollar international corporation. As you do.
I still haven't found the exit from that event horizon. Not that I'm looking...