Inked out
They never should’ve let me get needles
Here I am, cannonballing back into your inbox after months gone. I didn’t plan to write this today1; I don’t know exactly what it is that compelled me to put my thoughts out and on display just now of all times. I’ve signaled enough on social media lately, projecting vague feelings and coded images fishing for reactions and attention. But that’s all I’ve been able to muster these past months, as every time I think about putting words out into the world I tell myself that my time would be better spent on the more ambitious projects I’m striving to finish, and then I sit and look at empty pages, wracking my brain for the energy that has yet to come to order the stories in my head into a form that someone else outside of it can actually understand and appreciate. I see people subbing to this newsletter as if there were new content on the way, and I appreciate that. But I have been hard pressed to find the will to write anything for you.
These are the times when I feel the most frustrated, when I feel the need to DO SOMETHING AND CREATE. These are the times that my brain starts to twitch, and I begin to feel the need to cover every inch of my body in ink2.
This isn’t exactly a recent phenomenon. When I was in high school, before I had any actual tattoos, I took a slightly different approach to body art. I would fall into what I can only describe in the Victorian mode as periods of melancholy, weeks on end when I would simply feel Off. These were times when I would operate from a baseline of overexposed emotion that was slightly off-kilter. I think the way that people once used the term “blue” applies here, except I had no baggage to pull me down. The most fitting word for this I can come up with is “discontent,” to go full Shakespearean. There would be no real reason for these periods outside of my own brain chemistry, and maybe the weather. I had a largely blessed adolescence as those go, outside of a subliminal feeling of constraint I didn’t quite acknowledge to myself beyond these periods.
When these moods were at their height I would go into my parents’ small bathroom and look at myself in the mirror and use grooming kit scissors to scratch the shape of a cross into my chest. There was no element of self-harm present here; that has never appealed to me as a solution to whatever problems I’ve had, real or imagined. I would never actually cut into the skin, instead scratching just deep enough to leave a track on the epidermis, light lines that stood out to the touch and looked almost transparent. There was some element of pain to this, but I was not chasing a masochistic thrill; I used my pain threshold as a gauge for when I had gone too far. I rarely drew blood, and instead of making the marks deeper for the shape to scar and hold, I would go back and work the spot for multiple nights running. This wasn’t for anyone else to see; the cross was my own art project. I thought of it as a reminder of the control I was exerting over myself at the times I felt unmoored and disconnected from the world around me, and as a tie to God, where I hoped I could find support. Eventually the cross faded, long after the worst of my moods had lifted, and I quit the habit. I have no photos of this mark but I can conjure up its shape in my mind’s eye, even though I covered up that spot of skin with ink years ago.
I thought I would only ever get one tattoo. At least that’s what I told myself and my family. Looking back, I never had any conception of what my life might wind up looking like beyond the bounds of what I knew then, small town Ohio. I couldn’t imagine myself in the future in any form, tattooed or not. This project started as a sketch that I labored over as early as my sophomore year of high school, crosses and shamrocks and vague symbolism, the things I imagined constituted elements of an identity. When boys I knew were allowed to get their first pieces at around 16, mostly generic tribal or religious iconography and familial signifiers, I dialed back on my own designs. The thought of getting my own was real once it was within my reach on my peers’ bodies, so it was not something I would spend my time on if I weren’t serious about doing it myself. I grew up in a place and time where tattoos didn’t hold the same space as a form of individual self-expression as I often associate with them now; they were more intended to signal that you were of a certain disposition (a self-styled hardass), and at that age, that you either had the types of parents that would allow you to make consequential decisions on your own or that you had the gall and guile to go around them to do what you wanted. While in my current social strata a constellation of small scribbles on your arm might denote an eye for aesthetics and a do-anything attitude3, at that time a biceps band or a shoulder piece meant that you believed you were among the toughest people in your small town.
I think about this now and there’s not much difference between these inclinations. They’re only separated by a chasm of class and a relatively rapid shift in social mores around self-modification. When I grew up, young people and very few others had tattoos, and it was less counter-cultural than “anti-social” (in the way uptight people use the term). But that changed. I remember visiting my parents at home a summer or two ago and going to a suburban chain restaurant and marveling at the number of middle-aged people walking around with visible ink, as if there had been a mandate issued when I was away that dictated everyone under the age of 60 be given at least two shoddy pieces of body art, stat. I’m not sure if the change is just a growing acceptance for this kind of self-expression or that it’s the same type of signifier as before on the same type of person, just that a greater number of people around where I grew up have fallen down a class rung. Really I think it’s also become less shameful to try to hold onto the trappings of a young person’s life now that everyone’s mother and weird uncle has social media and the internet more broadly to give them a warped idea of the signifiers that might project that they’re perpetually in their twenties, if only in their heads4.
Once I was in college with some separation from the people I grew up with and those attitudes I finally got up the courage or foolhardiness or whatever to go get tattooed myself. After a long night talking with friends in the way that you can only do when you are young and earnest in the space you feel the most safe I was struck for the first time by the impulse I described to begin this post. An idea stuck in my head and I needed to get it down onto my skin, to make it permanent. This is what has happened to me before all of my other tattoos up til now: I get the initial shape of the piece in a thought, and I start to fixate. I sketch little designs, and then look for references online, then drop it for a moment. And then my brain latches back onto it until I take steps to go get it done. I stare at the spot on my body I think would work best, until I invariably find a better one. And then I flip back. Or not. It’s all-consuming. I’ve never gotten a tattoo on impulse, even now.
Back then, I went home for spring break and found the place I got my first two tattoos, an absolutely horrible decision that should have put me off the practice for years. As much as I wanted the tattoo I wanted to stay in my family’s good graces more, so after getting my grandmother’s blessing—she had told me at one point that she would take a cheese grater to the skin if I got one—so I found an artist at my cousin’s boyfriend’s recommendation instead of walking into a shop. He wasn’t the type of person I should’ve looked to for any advice, but he had been allowed to get his first tattoo without family drama because his mother picked his artist. So I went to this woman who rented an office in the rear of a beauty parlor for my first consultation, and not understanding anything, overpaid her for a truly terrible Celtic cross on my inner biceps that bled for days and didn’t have a single straight line.
I should have walked the moment she admitted that she didn’t do much artwork, mostly permanent cosmetics. I think back to that time and wonder why she took on a project that she clearly couldn’t handle, especially when she talked to me about the daughter she had my age, and the lecturing she did about tattoo best practices and safety at conventions. I wonder why she never thought to herself that maybe she shouldn’t be taking a 19-year-old’s money when there was a serviceable parlor not a half-mile down the street. And then I wonder why I went back to her the next year for a second piece, a triquetra on my triceps, that she mangled even worse. When I eventually went to that parlor later that year, they told me they had never heard of the woman and asked if the pieces were five years older than they were and fixed the shoddy work she had done as best they could.
Even with the bad experience to start I was immediately taken in by the process of getting a tattoo. It was more than the ritual of it, although that was a big draw; the bzzz of the machine and the smell of the ink and green soap and ointment and the surprising warm throbbing heat sensation of the needle. I do feel at ease when I’m getting tattooed. I think it’s silly when people call things “therapy” that aren’t actually therapy—and I trade in these trope-y interests, from exercise to writing to obsessing over music—but I have come closest to understanding the sentiment when I’m getting a tattoo.
The real appeal to me was that I could make a decision and walk away with a tangible reminder of it, that it would stay with me always. I had that control. We make decisions every day that have no tangible, visible effects beyond that moment, even if it’s a consequential choice. I can decide tomorrow that I’m going to drop everything and drive to California, but I wouldn’t be reminded of that anywhere other than in my head afterward. I am a painfully nostalgic person and I can look down and be reminded of my decisions all over my body, an immediate jumpstart to the neural path back to that moment in time in my memory. I think that’s also why I have never been able to separate tattoos with meaning and intent. Even the pieces that I have that aren’t particularly “meaningful” in their form are still tied to important moments, points of time in my experience that stand out for when I decided to set something down onto my skin.
This all leads to me now. During the latter stages of the deep pandemic in early 2021 I felt little control over myself or my body or my circumstances. I knew I wasn’t alone; I had talked to some people who went beyond cutting their own hair all the way to giving themselves tattoos during the quasi-lockdown period. I wrote an article about this, which was incredibly interesting and informative and surprisingly the deepest I’ve gone in on tattooing for work5, but I was mostly interested in learning about how I could do this myself. I needed that permission from myself, I think. I was under extreme stress due to a situation in my personal life, and I needed to have that tangible reminder that I could make consequential decisions. So I got the needles, and I started doing my own tattoos.
At first, this was fairly limited. I saved the hand poke for the biggest moments of catharsis I could imagine, during the times I was struggling the most. But I also got three shop tattoos in 2021 after my first self-tattoo, all bigger pieces I could never have done on my own. In 2022 something broke in my head, and the process of putting down the ink myself became more appealing to me than the ritual of the shop (and the likelihood that the tattoo actually looks good). I haven’t been back in a shop since 2021, and I haven’t hit on an idea that screams “an artist should really be doing this” since then. Well. The shape of my dog’s nose probably counts for that. But I did it anyway. And the outline of Ohio. But I did that too, and fixed it later after the first attempt came out all wonky.
I can enter a state where I am totally focused in a way that I struggle to when I try to write, probably because I can’t touch my phone without exposing my hands to germs. The feeling of the needle is much different than with a machine, too; when I wrote the article back in ‘21 I gave a bit of a flourish and compared it to “a quick puncture of a flower’s thorn.” Okay … sure. Since we all regularly self-flagellate with roses. When I was doing the dots and dashes of my first few Morse code pieces, maybe that was more apt. With more experience and more ambitious pieces under my belt I’d say it’s more of quick prick from … a needle. I don’t know. The focus on the design is where most of my attention lies. The smells are the same though—ink and green soap and ointment, that transport me less to a specific place and more to the state of mind where I feel most comfortable as a state of creation.
This is all clearly something I’m doing to feel control, even if it’s totally my head. There are communities for which this practice is much more important, whether because it’s a traditional method of self-modification in the case of indigenous peoples or a radical form of self-expression and autonomy, for people of other marginalized identities and groups. I’m not claiming that same need. And I’m not claiming to be totally pure in my self-ornamentation. It’s an aesthetic choice, and obviously on a lizard brain level I think my tattoos look good on my body. I got a bunch on my chest and wear open or no shirts all the time, come on—even I’m aware that it’s borderline pathetic posturing.
But I do feel self-satisfaction I don’t get in any other place when I can feel the brain itch and take out my little bag of needles and ink and focus for a few hours and make something appear on my skin all on my own, and know that will be there tomorrow, and then stay even longer.
Or when I eventually dusted this off, weeks later after I initially opened up this browser window and started tapping away, to finish it off. Or the next time after that. This hasn’t’t been easy going.
Yes, it might feel a bit silly that I’m writing about this as someone who, in the grand scheme of things, is not very heavily tattooed. I don’t have sleeves, or a ton of visible work at all, really. I counted as I was doing this and I think the official count at the moment is 30. But this is what’s on my mind so this is what you get to read about, if you so choose! I’m not forcing you! (I hope you are still reading, thank you for indulging me).
I’m not saying this to dunk on anyone. This is definitely the classification/group/whatever that I probably fit most into. I’m signaling with my tattoos, I know this.
I am absolutely guilty of this. There are times when I feel I’m in a state of arrested development with no clear path forward—and then I remember that I live in a place where I will probably never be able to afford to own property, the world is burning, etc., and I chill out a bit.
I say surprisingly because I very briefly worked at Inked Magazine covering tattoo culture, my first print job and stop number three in my five-job year from October 2015 to October 2016. That was media layoff number two. Should’ve known something was up when they let me write almost all the copy for an issue (of the Urban Ink imprint, not the main title) on a $35k salary.