The Tattoo Diaries

My tummy hurts, and when I stand up, it feels worse. So I'm not doing the dishes right now. Instead, I'll tell you about all my tattoos, in the order of newest to oldest. After all, they're part of the reason for choosing the name "Inky Neverwhere." I don't have pictures of all of them. I don't have pictures of most of them.

The one that's currently serving as my profile picture is the most recent, just a few weeks old. It's on my left bicep. The design is from the tarot card Strength, specifically from the Rider-Waite deck, which is the bestselling deck of the past century - and will, in fact, reach its centennial in 2009. Strength is my favorite card to draw in a tarot reading. Rather than copy straight from the card, JP (my friend and tattooist) gave it shading and depth, and used more vibrant colors. I also requested that the woman be a brunette like me rather than blonde like the card. We chose not to frame the design with the card elements, but kept the infinity symbol that floats above the woman's head. Leaving the edges open allows for a sleeve or half-sleeve to be developed around it in the future.

A few weeks before that - specifically, on November 4 - JP added color to a line piece on my right shoulder blade that I'd gotten ten years prior, to the date. Almost to the hour. The design itself is a combination of floral and sculptural elements, from a late 19th century illustration of a French Archbishop's crozier (kind of like a Pope Stick, but lower in the hierarchy) dated to the Romanesque period of the AD 800's. I was into some idea of Absolute Beauty, with as few symbolic associations as possible, at the time I got it. That was the year I ended a bad, bad significant relationship (of the legally bound variety), and the date I got it also marked the tenth anniversary of a particularly dangerous brush with teen angst. This year, on the twentieth anniversary (and a full decade after that relationship mistake), I was going to get the Strength tattoo, but I didn't realize until that afternoon that it was the design I wanted. JP needed more time to work with the art, because of its tiny details, but he was geared up to do some ink, and it was important to me to mark the date, but not with just any random thing. So we evolved the crozier, in the way emotions can evolve over twenty years.

JP's first tattoo on me was a black feather, about two inches high, just below my left clavicle. I had to wear a strapless bra for a week - and I only have one, so I had to wash it every day. It was last year, in the summer. There are so many directions the meaning of a feather can take. A quill pen for writing, a remnant of an angelic visitation, the freedom of a bird...

Prior to the feather, there were nearly ten years in which I didn't get any ink. I never had the time, money and a good idea in conjunction. I have to admit that JP and I have worked out a pretty sweet deal. I babysit his daughter, he tattoos me. There's sort of an equivalence ratio of babysitting hours to tattoo hours, but we don't nickel-and-dime. He's been BFF with my husband for years, and we both trust him (trust being essential when needles and permanency are involved). He's also just a damn good artist!

So, back ten years to the crozier design, which most people think is just an orchid. I had the night off from assistant-stage-managing some pretty intense opera rehearsals, and I was a little agitated, it being the date it was. I went alone to Grimm's, which I believe is no longer there. It was around 40th and Main, in KCMO. An artist named Whispering Danny was working that night. I had imagined the tattoo would be as small as the drawing I brought, not even a couple inches high, but to get all the detail in it, Danny said it would have to be about the size of my hand. This would be a jump in tattooed-ness from the cute little pieces I already had. I sat backwards on a chair, keeping most of my shirt on, and for the first two hours I was surprised by how little it hurt. Somehow, though, the last half-hour was excruciating. Danny wasn't doing anything differently - he explained that your brain helps you ignore the pain for a certain amount of time, but then starts thinking you should be about finished.

The tattoo before that was a green butterfly above my left knee, just an inch or so, squared. I drew the design myself, to look like stylized Asian calligraphy strokes. There wasn't really a special occasion or meaning connected to it, but I had been craving a tattoo for a few months, and I've always liked butterflies. Who doesn't? A new tattoo shop had opened in Lawrence, called In the Skin. I got my navel pierced there, too, but neither the shop nor the piercing lasted.

I have a confession to make: I ditched early from my cousin's Bat Mitzvah reception to get my second tattoo. I had just switched my major (um, again) to theatre, and I thought that the Comedy and Tragedy masks would make a wonderful tattoo. I think I was right: even though my career path has gone other ways, life has certainly seemed a balance of the two. That's another one I designed: there's plenty of flash art of the masks, but most of what I'd seen was larger than I wanted, and in varying degrees of grotesque. My design was simple and angular, with Comedy in rose tones and Tragedy in blue and green. It's on my right ankle, and I honestly don't notice it that often anymore. In fact, I just noticed that the lighter pink has more or less faded away. I don't know if I'll have it touched up. The ankle has very little flesh over the bone, and lots of nerve endings. I nearly passed out from the pain.

And my very first tattoo... a rosebud picked from flash art on the wall. I was eighteen, a freshman in college, and I'd just ended my first serious relationship. I wanted something on my body that my ex didn't know. It's very small, and just below my left hipbone: the most "hide-able" spot I could do it without removing my pants. This was December of 1990, and a tattoo at the time still set a girl apart. I think Cher had just started displaying hers. The sorority girls weren't into it yet. Neither were the good, decent small-town Kansas girls in my scholarship hall. Other girls came back from winter break showing off promise rings... I came back with my skin permanently altered.

Now you know. One of these days, I'll take pictures of them all. For now, my tummyache is gone, and I have a sinkful of dishes waiting.