A few nice tattoos images I found:
The Tattoo
Image by Elmo Keep UPDATE: see how it's coming along here. >>> So I had a great idea: I would get a giant tattoo on my back. And ow, my God, the pain! The pain, here it comes! Excruciating! Searing, searing, hot hot hot! Ow! It does not get any better! Ever! At any time during the procedure (which I have to remember, IS VOLUNTARY). Help me, please. I'm dying. It burns with the heat of one thousand suns. Like the worst sunburn you ever had in your life, ever, and that sunburn being stung by bees, many bees at once. Jesus! What? Why did I do this? It is exhilarating. Afterwards, I am invincible! But in the mean time, I think I will die before it is finished. I'll die. We have few chances in life to face our fears (bears, greatly venomous snakes, tax returns), and for me very specifically, I am scared, equally, of: needles and pain. For instance, when I have to give blood, or worse, when blood is taken from me and spirited away to a facility where it is analysed to be sure it does not contain traces of fatal diseases, say, I cry. Involuntary, embarrassing tears. Many of them. Sometimes I wear a hat so I can pull it over my face and so the nurse taking my blood won't see what a pathetic, quivering excuse for a girl I am. "Just wait until you give birth!" This is often thrown at me and I just think, "NO no! God, no! Just knock me out and wake me up and present me with my charmed and perfect infant!" Instead I smile wanly through the tears and try and laugh about this horrible pain in my arm. And why are you taking my blood? I need that to live! An hour before I have to be there. I feel as though I am readying for some great battle. I eat a giant bowl of pasta. It has cheese on it, extra. I am ready? I am not ready. I am filled with both terror and excitement. Ok, shit. This is it. I am going. I am alone. Goodbye. I stop at the bar, conveniently right next door, just about, and swallow a shot of tequila. What? It's midday on a Monday, yes. Why are you looking at me like that? That reminds me, Get vodka, please. A lot, for afterwards. Thankyou. OK, see you later. I was very specific with things about the fish. The fish are you and I. We are together, entwined, against the current, borne back ceaselessly and all that, only not so fatalistic. At all. This is triumph! The waterfall runs down (well, obviously) my back, cascades down my spine (this part is particularly bad, the pain, you will see), and the fish are swimming upstream. They are striving, you see, constantly. Ever upward, they are swimming. It was important that their facial expressions accurately reflect this inner state of their being, that they are you and I, respectively, though also, interchangeably. Depending. So the faces of the fish, I had these instructions to give: their faces must appear determined. But not angry. Purposeful, but not aggressive. The look in their eye must signify forging, ever onward. They are happy to be doing this work, it is their choice. Do you see? There is much mutual furrowing of brows between the tattoo artist and I. "But you aren't really going to do any of that, are you?" "No. Not really. I think I understand though." "Ok," I say. When I go back a month later to look at the drawing it is perfect. Why am I doing this? I wonder in knots of anxiety the sleepless night before. Do you not understand, it symbolises, X and Y, and all that? It will speak of the immutable us-ness of this moment, now, today. It will say certain things about me, on my behalf, that I am loathe to articulate incase they come out wrong, but you will see them, right there. And it will say these things about me, and occasionally in the future, to me, forever. This body is immaterial, some say. I agree, all is transient. It will whither and die, become (crossing fingers) old and give out, and then I will leave it behind. But until then it is mine and I will decorate it in the manner I see fit. So this is a permanence of some kind, such as we all crave for all of our lives, and when I put on my jacket noone will see it. I will never see it except for craning my neck in the mirror, if I am naked. But I will know it is there. I am looking at the tattoo stencil. It is very big. It will stretch from its upper most point, just below where my head joins my body, and continue down, to just above my coccyx. It is buttressed on one side by the tender ridges of my spine, and on the other by the even more tender troughs of my ribs. It is very beautiful, I look at the fish and am pleased with their expressions of utter serenity/determination/intractable commitment that surely -- surely! -- everyone will see. I smile at them. They are swimming elegantly up the waterfall, down which float cherry blossoms over their smiling heads. It occurs to me then, that I will have to be naked from the waste up to get this tattoo, and this fills me with unbidden terror. This is it! I cannot be half naked, here, in public with all these people! That's crazy! This cannot go forward. Then I look and see the tattooers tattooing the tattooees, who are each as equally absorbed in their tasks of metering out and withstanding the scolding hot pain, and realise that noone will look at me, for even a second and my escape plan is ruined. Evaporated. I wish very hard for a moment that the tattoo will somehow magically attach itself to my body and be done, and finished and lovely. Or someone will hit me in the head with a shovel and I'll wake up when it's perfectly over and done with. No. NO, no no. I am lying face down, and gripping the legs of the table beneath me and listening already, to the five hours of meticulously, empirically selected music I will be listening to for the duration of the this time. It will help me zone out, zone it, go there, man, I'm on it, I'll find the centre, I am Zen, I am at one, my totem is-- SERIOUSLY! No! FUCK! Fuck!Fuck!Fuck!Fuck!Fuck!Fuck!Fuck!Fuck!Fuck!FUCK!! This is the worst! It is worse than you can ever, ever imagine. It is so bad. I am trying to imagine that I am anywhere else but here. I try very hard. I am at a rock and roll show, I am there, the music taking me there, to the front of the stage where the men dressed like Demonic, flying superheroes, with Batwings, and the spitting of fire, that was a great show! I am right there, smelling engine fuel. And then I am yanked uncermoniously back to present when the needle (which is puncturing like a sewing machine would, only without thread, and much, much faster, and you are the fabric passing beneath) hits my spine and something shoots up along it and ricochets into my skull, like a drilling I can feel through my body, rattling the table under me, but it was only for a second then gone. And I am here again, in the room, on the table, looking very intently at the wall that I see I am hitting with a fist w ithout realising. I can be nowhere but here in this moment, I am perfectly awake, I am wholly alive. It is terrible, terrible pain. It has been three minutes. Much, much (so much) later, it was almost, almost over. A long time had passed, four hours and more. Though I had a few breaks, for cigarettes and a chocolate bar, each of these ill-advised diversions were false dawns, as the needle going back down was like ripping open a wound each time. Horrible. Still, I had done it. Without feinting -- though I was nearly sick at about the forty-nine minute mark. Without whirring into an apoplexy of panic. Without leaving, halfway, never to return, never finishing, one of those idiots in that awful book of unfinished tattoos. Wimps. No. I did not cry, no matter what. Until I did. So though I am sure I will die, I don't. This is obvious! I am alive! I am unstoppable. I am above humdrum, the petty disagreements and abysmal tiny failures of the day. The bills I keep forgetting to pay and the dishes in the sink, and the whatever! Did I make the wrong choice, once, sometime? A hundred times? I don't care now. I can withstand anything. I know why I did this. Now, I think. Yes.
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