On Tattoos

Here’s the last essay from the collection I originally started late last year before turning the ideas into this blog! Ligthly edited!

I don’t remember thinking much about tattoos when I was young, but in my early twenties I was working at IKEA, pushing trolleys from the parking lot and into the warehouse where customers could get to them again. It was at this time I decided to get a tattoo.

I knew I was depressed, but I hid it well, and never talked about it with anyone, or even tried particularly much to do anything about it. I knew it came and went at this time. One day I’d wake up and I’d feel normal again. This time it resolved itself as I was listening to music, and the line “It’s okay” was being chanted in the song Jezebel by Acid Bath.

Yes, it would be okay. It’s okay, it’s okay. My life doesn't matter, the universe cares not for me, so I should just be happy instead of sad. I was pushing a long line of trolleys into the warehouse and I always saw the same spot on my arm as I took a breath and looked up to see the entrance so as not to collide with anyone. I decided to get “It’s okay” tattooed on that spot there and then.

Three years later I realized I still hadn’t even made an effort to even figure out where the nearest tattoo parlor was. Then I moved back to my hometown, met a tattoo artist at a party, decided to go through with it, and booked an appointment at the first available opening.

Going in I knew it was supposed to be painful and a Big Deal, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it didn’t hurt, it actually felt pleasurable. So I booked another appointment for next month.

I kept getting tattoos pretty much every month from August 2014 until the pandemic started and society shut down. I hit a snag in the summer of 2020, because I went swimming with my phone in my pocket. I’d kept a note in the Notes app for a long time with all the ideas for the tattoos I was gonna get, and when this wasn’t recoverable, I found I didn't remember many, and got even fewer ideas for new ones.

I got four or five tattoos in 2020/21 I think, but then I just stopped. I still have room for a few more, but not in places where I’d really see them. However, the last one I got really hurt a lot more than the previous ones had. The most painful one was the neck tattoo, years earlier, but the last one was in a place where it normally didn’t hurt me as much.

I realized that for me, getting tattoos was part of treating my own mental illness. The pain I felt from the tattoo needle was very similar to the pain of cutting myself, something I had stopped doing after pressure from friends and family, but I found this great release that let me go on hurting myself, but with acceptance from society and those around me.

After my mental health greatly improved, the need for and enjoyment of that pain disappeared, and I stopped getting tattoos. I’ve thought about getting three more in the years since then, and I have just booked myself an appointment in October for a new one. Recently looked over the names I got of Facebook friends on my leg and realized I don’t speak to like 85% of them anymore, so gonna start covering them up, an inevitable end point with as many tattoos as I have.

I don’t really think much about my tattoos, and have neither a negative or a positive emotional reaction to them. They’re just there. Other people have such a reaction and interest in them that always takes me aback. It always surprises me when people have opinions on tattoos in our modern times. Doesn’t everyone have one?

My tattoos all have a certain meaning, and represent something to me, but a lot of them are also sort of jokes. And a lot of them I just used to fill up space. I didn’t want any naked skin left for me to cut, in case I relapsed. I always thought I’d never cut if there was a tattoo on the skin, and so far that has held true.

Lately I’ve been flirting with the idea of writing down all my tattoos, or rather what they represent, as an exercise in memory and also because it might be a fun thing to see the result of. I’m pretty sure most of them are music related, but there are also a lot of “in jokes”, where the “in” part is basically just me. There would be a lot of explaining necessary to show why the Burger King logo, spelled Borger, is funny, I think. But maybe not? Maybe people can just laugh at my tattoos for their own reasons rather than the reasons they make me smile.

One time another dude with a neck tattoo nodded his head to me as we passed, as if we were part of some secret community. Or the way you say hi to people when going on a trip in nature. I still remember it, but mostly because I wrote it down and posted it on Facebook, I think. A lot of my memories seem to be based on writing them down or taking a picture.

I was at a bar a few months ago and a woman I didn’t know started talking to me while in line to get a drink, and I was rather taken aback, because that never happens. But then I noticed she also had a neck tattoo and that was what she was asking about. She found it hadn’t been as painful as she had anticipated, and I said it was the most painful one I took, but maybe that was due to my Adam’s apple.

Recently my friend Tommy T made an off hand joke about “the guy with the heart on his neck” and it made me realize my personal and private tattoos are visible, and being perceived by other people. I do not care for this. It makes me uncomfortable.

Tattoos were a big part of my life for a few years I suppose, and they retain some meaning, and were very important as therapy at the time, but I wouldn’t be particularly bothered if they were gone now either. But I suppose they’ll always stick around as a memento to the person I was for a little while. I’m someone else now, and I’ll be yet another different person in the future. The only constant is change.