Some advice: don't get your elbow tattooed or read things that bother you
I'm having an ongoing conversation with a needle and an artist. The latter I found through a recommendation so many friends-of-friends-of-friends removed that it stopped being a chain and became something closer to causality; it's the universe conspiring to introduce me to the person who'd spend the next decade putting holes in me on purpose.
This guy has been privy to a lot of pain. This guy has inflicted a lot of pain. I asked him to. He and that needle know something about the elbow joint underneath that I don't, like some old grudge being settled on behalf of every nerve ending unlucky enough to live this close to the surface. Tattoo artists have to be sadists and therapists and gentle parents all at once, sometimes within the same ninety seconds.
All elbows
Thin skin here linked straight to an internal oh-fuck-ometer that I did not know I had until it started reporting live from the scene. Everyone tells you this before you sit down, like it's a warning you might actually use.
(It is not and you will not.)
Thin skin means the artist and his machine aren't just drawing on you as much as they're negotiating directly with the skeleton.Which has Opinions about being negotiated with, none of them charitable. I watch his hand move in that steady metronome way β dip, stab, wipe, dip, stab, wipe β and somewhere around minute eleven my brain, offered nothing to chew on but the specific white-hot arithmetic of this hurts, this hurts, goes looking for anywhere else to be. Eleven folds into some horrible multiple of itself. It wanders off toward thinking about the thinking, un-experiencing the experience even as it's happening... you know, so I can write about it later. Experience is nothing, these days, if not fodder for the vast crawling internet, one more offering left on an altar that neither says thank you nor stops being hungry. This is what a mind does when you give it nothing but pain to work with: it goes looking for an argument. Any argument.
The one it dredges up, roughly: people are furious that other people keep blogging things. Not bad things β what would "bad" even mean here β just things that don't clear some invisible bar marked useful. And "useful" is doing a lot of work in that sentence too. I write the way I get tattooed: as a means to my own succor, my own quiet self-made ceremony. These needles are chiseling memory into skin the same way these words are being chiseled into the surface of some server, somewhere, humming in a windowless room I will never see.
The tattoos
The quick tour, for anyone still with me:
- Newest, just above the blue and yellow syringes β an abstracted accessibility symbol, its wheel framing a bear claw. Guess which came first, the claw or the life-history bands wrapped around it.
- Before that, a length of rope for the years spent in community education and leadership, and for a defunct side hustle called Bunnyrope that only a handful of people will ever have reason to remember.
- A stylized focus ring, styled after Canon's branding, though my camera has always been a Nikon. My wife shoots Canon. This one's less for me than for her.
- The elbow itself is a shutter set to roughly f/6.
Color goes in come September. Another appointment. Another small negotiated apocalypse.
But what does it meeeeeean
These marks are, ultimately, meaningless to anyone but me, even too the sparks of pain that came bundled with acquiring them.
But is that actually true, my All Reading Eye? Do they carry nothing beyond what they mean to me alone? They let you glimpse how the machinery behind this writing is put together Flawed, self-involved, strange... but a machinery all the same. And give a little more flesh to whoever's been narrating at you this whole time. If you find any value in that, why would you value it any less than writing that's shorter, plainer, less feral with its own imagery? Not everything has to be full β whatever full is even supposed to mean β to still say something true between one mind and another. Sometimes it's a glimpse instead of four fully fleshed ideas etched into skin like a well-worn metaphor. (Pun very much intended.)
Here's what I'm thinking, at this exact moment, in this exact chair: that I have volunteered a foot and a half of unarmored meat to stinging metal. I knew this walking in. Everybody who's ever gotten an elbow piece knows it walking in. It's the tattoo equivalent of a warning label nobody reads or heeds. I sat down anyway. I chose the shop. I chose the day. I chose the exact hour where I'd have nothing left to do but marinate in it, alone with the needle and whatever thoughts it summoned up out of me.
You always have choice
Nobody made me choose this. And you don't have to find any value in that fact, or even stick around long enough to reach this sentence and decide. It carries its weight regardless if you read all of it, some of it, or none of it, and regardless of what you make of it once you have.
So here's what walking out of the chair would have cost me: an unfinished piece, a wasted deposit, a hole blown clean through an afternoon I'll never get back, and an artist who did nothing wrong left standing there with a needle raised at a man who apparently reconsidered consequences halfway through living them. That is not the same category of cost as closing a browser tab. But there's a whole strain of internet-brain that treats I saw a blog post I didn't need as though it belongs on the same ledger as pain I did not consent to, as if scrolling past somebody's diary entry about their cat, their diet, their fourth attempt at re-explaining the same grief in a slightly different arrangement of words, is violence enacted upon the reader rather than a door the reader walked up to, opened themselves, and then stood inside complaining about the draft.
The part the discourse keeps forgetting: you can always leave the chair. The tab closes with less effort than it took to open it. Nobody bolted you to that sentence. Nobody's coming to collect a debt if you never finish reading a post that was never, in the first place, truly written for you.
The wrap goes on around hour four. Vaseline sheen, plastic film, the whole arm throbbing underneath it with a heat that's settled into something closer to a low, even hum. It'll ache worse tomorrow. It'll peel in about a week, itch in that specific maddening way skin itches while it's busy becoming something else entirely, and I won't, go looking for whose fault it is. There isn't a whose. There's just the choice, sitting there afterward, plain as the ink laid into it.