it looks just a little like this

So, the tattoo saga. Here we are.

A long time ago, I decided that I wanted text from The Secret History on my body. My friends and I all read it in high school, and it’s one of those books that just changed my life. (Please imagine that being said aloud in a whiny teenagery sort of way.) There was an excerpt from that book that went as follows:

“The Greeks were different. They had a passion for order and symmetry, much like the Romans, but they knew how foolish it was to deny the unseen world, the old gods. Emotion, darkness, barbarism.” [Julian] looked at the ceiling for a moment, his face almost troubled. “Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?” he said. “It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, ‘more like deer than human beings.’ To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”

There is more (500 pages or so) but that will do. Perfectly enough, the only place I could find this full text online is a quote page of another student who went to my high school and presumably read this book while taking the same class I did. We also read Native Son and The Bacchae, and then we went in a big yellow schoolbus to see Natural Born Killers. Best fucking class I’ve ever taken.

ANYWAY. There are several different ways the text “Beauty is Terror” could be interpreted. There is the explanation from the book, of course, and that’s definitely part of it. The whole reason I got into acting in the first place was as a way to get out of myself for awhile. Of course, along the way I realized that there is far more benefit to staying present and not letting myself be lost, but that inclination has never gone away. The other side of the coin is this - in order to get where you really want to be, you have to do some scary shit. If you want to know who you are and what you are capable of, and if you want to live a life of any immediacy or meaning, you have to walk through the fire. This text combined all the previous ideas I’d had into one neat little package.

So, the first thing I did was research the UW Classics department online. I sent an email to the secretary asking for direction to a professor who could help me translate the concept I wanted into ancient Greek. “Not modern Greek?” the professor asked. “Definitely not”, I responded. He sent back several different options, and I picked.

Next, I started researching fonts. I was having a HELL of a time when my pal Sarah came to the rescue and started sending me cool ones she’d found online. Instantly, I found one I loved - called Milan - and typed out what I wanted several times to see how it looked. Bold? No. Italic? No. It was fine just the way it was.

Then, I went to Laughing Buddha and had a consultation with a tattoo artist named Marci. She was supposed to do a drawing for me - it never happened. I think maybe she forgot, and I think maybe I want my $20 back. Seriously, dude. Anyway, I finally got tired of waiting for her to get back to me, so I went back in and scheduled a consultation with Anji. This consult actually happened while Corey was here, and as soon as I started talking to her I FREAKED OUT. She looks a great deal like Aimee, and their speech patterns and laugh are eerily similar. There was one piece in her portfolio that I connected with, and she felt confident that we could replicate the style on me. I felt at home with her right away, so we scheduled the appointment for a week later.

Fast forward to yesterday at three. When I arrive, I am feeling sort of high. I couldn’t sleep last night and I’ve been preoccupied all day. I walk in the door, and Anji is sitting behind the counter knitting a scarf. Busta Rhymes is playing overhead. Both of these things seem like good omens to me. We go out front to smoke a cigarette, and she grills me for a bit about exactly why I am getting this tattoo, and what I want it to be.

We go upstairs and she starts drawing on me with magic marker, talking about how you can tell what kind of day she’s having by what colors of marker she uses. (Mine are pink and yellow.) She puts on this crazy music that mixes all these different songs together - one song is Midnight Oil simultaneously with Metallica. Later on, there is a clip from Sesame Street Gold that I recognize - it’s Oscar saying “When is this album going to be over? I’m tired of everybody.” This transitions directly into an old Seekers song that was on another record I listened to constantly as a child. She has me flex my arm muscles three different ways, and then she designs the tattoo specifically to flatter the contours of each muscle. I feel a bit like Ah-nold. She says “You’ve got nice muscle tone.” I feel like maybe all the pumping iron has paid off. Once it’s drawn, she begins “sketching” the outlines with gray ink, so that if the marker rubs off the design would still be there. When she starts, I am shocked at how little it hurts. My first tattoo experience, as some of you might know, was unpleasant to the extreme. My second one was a breeze, so I had no idea what to expect here. She finishes the sketch and does the text, and then we take another smoke break. By this point, I have been upstairs for over an hour.

Outside, she tells me that most people can only sit for a couple of hours, and that her own personal limit is four hours at a time. (This should mean something, as about 75% - if not more - of her body is covered in ink.) She tells me that the body knows when it needs to quit, and it will tell you. Since I am scheduled for a good three hours under the needle, this bit of information is a little unsettling.

Back upstairs, she starts the top side of the design. A few minutes in, one of the other artists pops her head in and says “You have a visitor.” It’s Pwe, who’d promised to come check in on me. She goes out and gets me a Red Bean Bubble Tea smoothie from Broadway Market, and when she comes back we give her a sneak peek of how things are going. (For the record, nobody takes care of me like my Pwe. I hope I can bring her drinks when she gets her tattoo.)

The music has cycled from the bizarre mixmaster to Sonic Youth. I am slurping down the smoothie as Anji gets closer and closer to my underarm. When she originally drew the design there, she laughed. Our conversation went like this.

Me: “What?”
Her: “Oh, boy. You’re going to hate me.”
Me: “What?”
Her: “This swirl right here.” (she points to a swirl right in the fold.) “You’re going to cry.”
Me: “No, I’m not.”
Her: “We’ll see.”
I have my token scary moment right about then - according to Anji, you have to have one during every session. She is scratch-scratch-scratching away at particularly tender skin, on top of which I have been drinking my smoothie WAY too fast and have given myself the chills pretty hardcore. My pain sensors are wigging, I am shivering uncontrollably, and all of a sudden the lead singer of Sonic Youth begins SCREAMING. One of the other artists shouts up from downstairs “Hey, you guys are scaring me!” and I can’t do anything but laugh. We stop for a smoke break - it’s been another hour.

People keep stopping by to look at the work in progress and ask questions. One hippie girl recognizes that the part of Anji’s tattoo that’s where her Adam’s Apple would be is a specific type of fractal. We have a shockingly dorky conversation about high-level math, and we go back in. I feel better, and am wearing half of my sweater to keep warm. She suggests that we can stop and do the rest later if my body is freaking out, and I say no. I explain that I get the shivers at the drop of a hat under normal circumstances, and that she shouldn’t worry about me. We go back to work.

She finishes the last little bits of the top and moves on to the bottom section. Now, we are listening to Beck - singing along to Loser and trying not to giggle so much that we screw up what she’s doing. I had never listened to that CD all the way through, and some of the stories that she tells about her personal life connection to certain songs have me in stitches. Every time he yelps something high-pitched in the background of a song, we both lose it.

I can’t take it anymore and have to go have a bathroom break. The “keyring” is a huge spatula. Rion tells me it’s because I have to “stir it up before [I] use it”.

The end of the Beck album has some songs on it that are very slow. I call one of them “What happens when the Gregorian Monks sing stoned”. There is also a couple minutes of INCREDIBLY ANNOYING hidden track at the end, and then we move on to Leonard Cohen - the really old stuff. It’s mellow and melancholy and fits our mood perfectly. We have moved on to the last part - the fairly sizeable section that’s all on the underside of my arm, starting about a third of the way up from my elbow and going all the way up. This is by far the most intense pain of the process, and is even harder to deal with than the part of the tattoo that was right on my shoulderbone. Significantly harder. For that section, my bones were vibrating. I could feel the ripples heading out through my bones and into my teeth - but that was a very palpable sort of pain. One you can set your will against. This is completely different. Thankfully, by this point I am exhausted. My adrenaline and endorphins have been running high for several hours, and my skin is sort of used to what’s happening to it. I am glad we’ve saved this part for last, because if we’d started here I don’t know that I would have made it through the whole thing. I am breathing, breathing, breathing. Using my diaphragm. Staring at that same point on the light on the ceiling above me - which, when I sit up again, will make me see huge black splotches for several minutes.

We have another cigarette break, as it’s been another hour. She talks about what she did before becoming a tattoo artist. We talk about how draining this process is for her, because of how much emotional support she gives to the people she tattooes. Plus, there’s a huge level of artistic concentration necessary which just wears her out. I know the feeling. I have been concentrating with all my might to stay present throughout this process. To breathe through the discomfort. I want to remember the entire experience later, but first I need to complete it. We are both really dragging as we go back upstairs. We are almost done.

Anji starts the “Icy blue glow of death”, as she calls it. We are back on the outer side of my arm again, and compared to what I’ve just experienced this is a breeze. However, at one point I hear her say “Oh, no.” This is never reassuring in this type of situation. “What?”, I say. “Well,” she responds, “your skin is starting to reject the ink. I’m putting it in, and it’s spitting it back out. You might be okay mentally with going on, but your body is calling it quits.” This, as you might imagine, pisses me off. I am all about the mind over matter, and am frankly pretty thrilled with myself for what I’ve just accomplished. Fortunately, she is VERY close to done. “Tell you what,” she says. “When you come back for your touch-up session in three weeks, I’ll finish it off for free. I could do it in fifteen minutes, but I’m not going to put ink in there if it isn’t going to stay.” I think this is a great idea. We cover me in Saran Wrap and paper towels and tape. “I feel like a piece of leftover meat,” I say. She laughs. Finally, at long last, we go downstairs.

I have been there for five hours. “You sat really, really well,” she says. “Your mind won out over your body. You did a great job.” This makes me feel really good, especially considering what she told me earlier about how long people can stand to be tattooed for. (For the record, I did not cry. Not once. I did not even come close.) Generously, she only charges me for three and a half hours of ink time, even though I am certain it’s been more than that. She tells me to come back the next day so we can take some pictures when I am no longer gooey and bleeding, and I say that sounds great. I hand over the cash I had gotten during my lunch hour, I grab my bottle of Provon (that she gives me for free,) and I walk to my car.

I am so pumped that I feel like my brain is going to explode. The whole ride home in the car I am more thrilled than I have ever been about anything in my life. I know this is mostly due to the insane amount of chemicals my body had created, but I don’t care. It’s an amazing, exhilirating feeling, and it reminds me why I enjoy this so much. I have just lived through something I will never forget - and while it was a bit terrifying, it was also absolutely beautiful. I have come full circle.

I get home and sit down in my comfy chair with my dog, some Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and a bottle of Scotch. I now have a great big piece of one-of-a-kind art on my body. Life, at the moment, is really fucking good.