Healing
“what noun
would you want
spoken on your skin
your whole life through?”
My Tattoo - Mark Doty
When I first read this poem by Mark Doty (which I’ll be quoting more as we go long) I didn’t have any tattoos. I loved the collection this poem is from called Sweet Machine. It's a kind of sexy glimmering inspirational book about the gleaming qualities of Murano glass, living at the coast in P-Town, striding through New York with a queer confidence. I barely remember the tattoo poem at all back then. Rereading it now, years later, the tattoo poem stands out (amongst so many other stand out poems! It’s such a good collection!) probably because I got my first tattoo just over a month ago.
Here it is freshly done!
I’ve wanted a tattoo for ages now, but I’ve felt all this weird pressure and expectations from people that it’s simply not the done thing. I put it on the back burner to assuage others and then the pandemic happened. Coming out of the pandemic, both me and the husband felt we needed to do things to mark the shift into this new world. Shed a bit of the before. For him, he shaved his long hair off and I decided to get a tattoo.
Thanks to instagram the process was pretty easy, I found an artist I liked called Lenny (Hi Lenny!) he had flash available that I liked (that’s predrawn designs that tattoo artists offer as tattoos that you can have for a flat agreed rate with minimal changes) we had some messages on instagram and sent him a picture of my arm where I wanted to to go and the design of his that I liked, we agreed a date and time, I paid a deposit and that was that.
On the day I was buzzingly excited and worried mostly about my route there to ensure I didn’t turn up sweaty, panicked, or hungry. I was fine, I got there, Lenny was lovely and welcoming (and there was a cat!) we went through the health and safety stuff, sorted out the design and placement, I went for a pre-tattoo nervous wee, and then I laid down on the bed thingy (same one as for massages) and then he began.
“what was once skin
has been turned to something
made; written and revised
beneath these sleeves”
My Tattoo - Mark Doty
I’d call the initial feeling, frankly, just like being poked with a needle. As a hand sewer I have poked myself with my sewing needles time after time, sometimes drawing blood, and it hurts, sure, but it doesn’t hurt for long. The line work was pretty okay, not something I’d love to have all day long, but tolerable. The shading was a bit more painful, multiple needles and a moving around motion, not just a single direction. That was obviously done later on, I think by then I was so relaxed and zen I was enjoying it. What helped was Lenny, who I had a lovely chat with the whole time and felt a great connection with. I could see that tattooing was his passion and that I wasn’t just a canvas to him, I was a person and this was a special sort of relationship to have, tattooer and tattooed. It was finished quicker than I had expected and then I got up, did some stretches and deep breaths, we took some pictures and then Lenny applied the Second Skin plastic bandage thing which seals it all up from the elements and aids the healing process.
Healing. This long afterwards from the event itself. I’d sort of not thought about it much. Until you do something for the first time, you don’t know what the best and worst parts will be. Like riding a rollercoaster, afterwards you don’t look fondly on the bit when you’ve just sat down and you're faffing around with the lap bar.
I don’t think healing was bad at all. I think I healed very well indeed. I just had not prepared or considered how it would affect me. I had decided to be marked permanently, I had opened up my skin and invited ink into it, arranged in a lovely artistic way. I had laid down a present moment onto my skin, forever. Now in the weeks afterwards it was all I could think about.
I caught sight of my arm all the time, sat looking at it, all the detail in the lines and shade. Stared at the bits that were heavily black ink, like the lovely ink stains I get from writing with my fountain pen.
I was aware of it a lot and aware of how I needed to treat it (and myself) with care, how I needed to go through the process of healing. I needed to allow my body to do what it naturally needed to do. After a few days, I took off the second skin wrapping which was pretty painful, like peeling off a large very sticky plaster. Once it was off, I moisturised the skin with cocoa butter and continued to not cover it with sleeves much to let it breathe.
It is a strange adjustment, remembering that you have a tattoo, staring at it in the shower, or on the bus, catching strangers looking at it on the tube. The experience has taught me a lot. Not just that I want more tattoos, but I do. But about the afterwards of experiences. You can’t predict how an experience is going to affect you, reading about these things, watching youtube videos about it all, can’t prepare you for the reality. You can’t prepare for it happening and you can’t prepare for what comes afterwards. And that’s okay, that's how life is. I think as we get older and somewhat wiser we think we’ve seen it all and can mostly cope with everything that is thrown at us. It’s good, in a way, to be given something new to cope with, a new experience, a new set of problems, a new little bit of chaos. You remember how agile you are, you remember how strong you are and how much your body is trained and prepared to heal itself.
Here it is healed over a month later
“go ahead: prick and stipple
and ink me in:
I’ll never be naked again.
From here on out,
I wear the sun,
albeit blue”
My Tattoo - Mark Doty
