Nothing can quite prepare you for how it feels to have a whirring tattoo needle pressed into the base of your back.
Three years ago, I got my first tattoo, on the outside of my upper left arm. That's a nice, fleshy part of the body. It's not as sensitive as the lower back, has far fewer nerve endings. Think about it: Has it ever tickled much to have someone run his finger up and down the outside of your arm? Nah, a brush against the lower back is much more likely to elicit a tingle.
I knew this going in. An artist in a tattoo shop in Hawaii last year warned me. "Yeah, it looks hot there, but I'm not gonna lie: It hurts like hell."
Going in, I was trying to remember what it felt like to have my arm done. Whenever people asked, the best I could do to explain was, "It was like having a bad blister on my toe as a ballet dancer, except that instead of a rub here and a rub there, it was this constant, intense, burning pain."
Fun, right?
I also used the Internet to try to refresh my memory, surfing the various tattoo FAQ's. "Does getting a tattoo hurt?" a typical question went. Um, think about it, genius. You're being scratched, repeatedly, for an extended time, with a sharp needle.
People will tell you pain is relative. People have different thresholds for pain. And the amount of pain can depend on the part of the body, as we've established. I, for one, have a pretty high pain threshold -- all those years of ballet torture, learning to smile through the aches and pains and bruises and sprains, were good for something.
"So why do it?" And here you try to understand the motives of man. It's art. It looks cool. It's to mark a moment in time. It's a vehicle for change. The physical pain can help you escape the pain of mental anguish. It's to remember. It's to forget. It's for a sense of accomplishment, the sense that if you can survive through 45 minutes, 2 hours, three months' worth of sessions, then you can survive anything.
"But how do you get through it?" There are different ways of coping.
This was something I thought about all day, something I was hoping the Internet would give me a solution to. If this tattoo was going to hurt exponentially more than the one on my arm, and that first tattoo didn't exactly feel like a pinprick (see "constant, intense, burning pain"), then how would I sit through this one?
Tattoos do hurt, one Web site explained, but for some, tattooing induces a sense of euphoria. After the first 10 minutes, the pain is pushed to the background, and the person being tattooed attains a sense of calm, almost like an out-of-body experience. It's the endorphins working, sending a chemical rush to the brain, the body's way of tricking itself into thinking, "This feels goooooood."
On Thursday I went to scope out the tattoo shop and schedule an appointment for Friday. As I was taking care of paperwork, two girls were talking behind me. One was going to get her first tattoo, a faerie in rainbow colors on her right scapula.
"Is it going to hurt?" she asked her friend.
"I can't tell you. I got one but it was back here where all this flesh is," the friend said, tugging at a love handle.
"But I mean, it's gonna hurt a lot, right? Man, 'cause I'm not good with that. Is it like worse than getting blood drawn?"
And this is when I turned around to join the conversation, to help, because this chick's friend was doing a totally inadequate job.
"Oh, it'll hurt more than that," I said. "When they draw blood, they only stick the needle in once, you know?"
It hurts more than giving blood, than getting an allergy shot. I wouldn't know what it's like compared with breaking a bone, because I've never done that. I'm sure it doesn't hurt nearly as much as giving birth, but I wouldn't know, nor do I intend to find out. But it does hurt. There's no two ways around it. And for this girl's friend to try to imply that it wouldn't, well...
"Oh, no!" the squeamish one said.
"No, no," I said. "Just remember, after one or two hours, it'll all be over. And at the end, you will have accomplished this amazing thing." She gave me a "you crazy!" look, but I pressed on. "Seriously, it's going to look so beautiful. And when you're done you're going to love it, and you won't be able to believe that you did it, all by yourself, and that you were sooo brave."
She looked grateful, but I knew this little speech of mine wasn't really for her. It was for me. My little mantra, to convince myself.
***
I was nervous all the next day leading up to my appointment. The pep talk played on repeat in my head:
"It'll be over in two hours. Just two hours of your life. And it's going to look amazing. And people have certainly survived through worse. And if all those other people can handle it, so can you.
"Don't be a wimp."
It helped that I knew the place was top-notch, with fine artists and a good vibe. I'd met my guy, Byron, the day before, and he was all positivity and jazz.
He drew my design on a piece of wax paper and held it up to my back. It's hard to tell from an outline on paper how a tattoo is going to look once it's on the skin. And before doing something as permanent as this, it's natural to have doubts.
I looked at the design and thought, "Hmm ... I don't know. Is it the right shape? Does it curve right? Are all the parts moving in the right direction? It's not as wide as I envisioned it."
"See, I wanted to make it narrower," Byron said. A mind reader! "I've already done all these wider ones, so for this one I wanted to refine it, make it nice and narrow, more vertical."
Svelte. Slinky. O.K.
"Well, maybe just a little more curve in the middle here?" I nudged. I didn't want to offend his artistic sensibility. But this was my skin we were talking about. One time only. No second chances.
"Oh, sure, sure!" he said, fine with it. He did some erasing and retracing.
"And how about a little tongue like in those other pictures?" I said.
"You want a tongue?"
"Yeah."
"Sure, I can draw you a tongue. I'll draw it right on your skin."
And then there wasn't much else to say, so we got down to it. I inched my pants southward, straddled his chair, leaned forward and took a deep, deep breath.
I had arrived at the tattoo shop with two magazines in my bag. I didn't know if Byron would be the chatty type, and two hours seemed like a lot of time to sit for a tattoo without any distractions.
"I don't really talk much when I'm doing the drawing part," he said just before we got started.
"Oh, that's O.K.," I said. "I'll be fine."
I turned my magazine to the place I'd left off on the subway and got ready to focus elsewhere.
But then it started. And I learned something: It's impossible to read at the same time you're getting a tattoo.
The words were right in front of my face. But as the minutes passed and I opened and closed my eyes with each zing of the needle and breathed in and out and dug my fingernail into the palm of my hand in an attempt at pain misdirection, I realized the words weren't making sense. I tried reading the same paragraph, once, twice, three times, and the words were there, and I was forming them in my head, but it all dissolved into a swirl of letters bumping up against each other on the page. The needle was scrambling my brain. Or at least it had punctured the reading-comprehension wire.
After several failed attempts I finally decided that the effort was futile and laid my head on my hands, waiting for the euphoria to come.
It had been 10 minutes, hadn't it? Where was my high? My out-of-body experience? The Internet had promised me a tattoo-induced stupor, damn it!
But instead the opposite was happening. I was acutely aware of my skin and nerves and muscles. Tensing up made it worse; my muscles acted as a conduit, the electric-sharp pain radiating everywhere.
Breathe in, hold. Breathe out, hold. Breathe in, hold. Breathe out.
I couldn't decide whether it was better to close my eyes or keep them open, to let them wander. Paintings and sketches of other body art were ticky-tackied all over the walls. There was a bold black-and-white design just a couple of feet to my right, with thick lines and wavy swirls. With my head resting on my folded forearms, I let myself get lost in the image, let my eyes go blurry till the ink on paper took on a sort of fuzzy life.
My brain flashed from this to that -- imagine if so-and-so knew what I was doing right now; oh my god, why did I ever decide to do this?; buck up, camper, this is nothing compared with other people's suffering; don't pass out!; man, I could go for some lo mein from Mee Noodle Shop right about now -- but mostly I willed the euphoria to come on.
I became aware of Byron's fingers. The way they pressed into my skin. The soothing coolness as he smeared on ointment and wiped away blood. A few times he stood and leaned into me, bending over to work from the top down instead of from the bottom up. It felt good to feel his clothes against my skin, to shift my awareness to parts away from the intense burning at my lower back.
About 20 minutes in he took a pen and drew in the requested tongue. "Let's take a break. Check that out in the mirror and I'll be right back."
I backed up to the mirror on the wall and looked over my shoulder. The tongue was all right. But more important, the outline was halfway done! He was going so fast. Maybe it wouldn't be so hard to hang on.
And then we started again. Byron played music from a boom box while he worked. He had tapes -- old school! A mix of genres, mostly Spanish language, turned up loudly enough to dull the buzzing of the needle. The music was on the mellow side, thank god. When I got my arm tattooed in D.C., they blared head-banger heavy metal the whole time. Made me tense.
"O.K., now it's time to do some coloring!" he said.
"All right," I said. "Be honest. This part is going to kick my ass, isn't it."
It was the one time in the whole session I had showed any trepidation. It's just that I'd seen this done before. I'd been told this part was worst.
But "No!" Byron said. "This part is easier. The outlining is the harder part. Now your skin's all kind of numb, so you don't feel this as much."
I thought he was just being nice. Just like I was to that girl behind me in line. "You'll do great!" Bullshitting. "It'll be beautiful and amazing!" True, but also bullshitting.
But I was surprised to find that he was telling the truth. It wasn't quite as bad. He started at the bottom and started raking in the black. With the vibration it was hard to tell exactly what part he was working on. That is, the general spot was apparent from the sharp, stabbing pain, but because that pain wandered, it was hard to tell, for instance, how high up on my back he had gone. So after what seemed like forever, when he sprayed some cool stuff on my back and started rubbing it around, I thought that maybe -- please? -- we were done.
"O.K.!" he said. "One more break!"
D'oh.
I sidled up to the mirror, afraid to look. Yup. Only halfway done. But the pain had felt so much higher on my spine! I could practically feel the animal clawing up my back, just the way I wanted it. Alas.
Thankfully, Byron was much more chatty during the coloring part. He didn't have to concentrate so hard on the fine points of the design. He just had to stay within the lines.
"You have such great skin," he said.
"Thanks," I said. Blushing.
"No, seriously, it's so great. It's like drawing on paper."
Talking made the time go faster and the pain seem a millimeter farther away. We gabbed about music and dancing and travel and languages and brothers and sisters and work and more about dancing. We discovered a shared love of salsa when I explained that when I danced, I wanted this tattoo to slither.
"You want it to come alive!" he said.
"Yes!" He got it.
So we went on like this, the coloring and the vibrating and the searing pain, broken up by chatter and ointment and the boom box serenade.
"You're being so good," he said. "You're so patient."
"Well, that's part of the experience, isn't it?" I said. Tough girl. Oh, yeah.
"But you sit so well. Seriously, you can come back and I'll tattoo you anytime."
He sprayed more cooling liquid on my back and rubbed more stuff away, and then he sat back and said two words I couldn't have been more relieved to hear: "We're done!"
"Done?!" Yay!
***
So. Why do it?
I may get horrible vertigo. I may turn shy with certain people or timid at certain parties. I may freak out behind the wheel, and I may be mortally afraid of bugs. I may never want to squeeze a baby out of my body. I'll almost certainly never be brave enough to work in a war zone.
But I have willingly had shafts of metal driven through my ears and my tongue, and sat through hours of fiery pain at the business end of a pulsing needle. And I have lived to tell the tale.
So I guess I do it to prove to myself that I have some guts.
And, of course, it ends up looking pretty damn cool.
Meet Byron the Dancing Dragon (there's a bit of a glare because he's fresh from the shower, but you get the drift):
