Ink Stained, Perspective Changed

Sunday 7th February 2010, 11am, Wawee Coffee - Chiang Mai

Let me take you back to tigers. Picture in your mind's eye, if you would, a painting of a tiger. An adult female, black, amber and white striped, a serene and agile figure, still, graceful and poised, standing on a rock, peering thoughtfully in to dark and swirling waters of a river over which she is perched. She is majestically captured in, as William Blake would attest, fearful symmetry, vividly bright next to the misty pool beneath her. It sounds like a bewitching portrait doesn't it? Now - if you would - imagine this image, maybe 6 by 4 inches, on the right hand side of my lower back. For this is where it now resides in permanency, tattooed on the canvas of my skin.

I realise that opinions are widely divided on the subject of tattoos, and this is why I asked you initially to consider my new one for what it is first and foremost - a piece of art. I spent 3 hours in the parlour opposite my guest house yesterday afternoon, laying stretched out on the folding bed, flicking through the TV programmes as a means of distraction from the burning and biting digs of the needles. The first hour was little trouble to me, especially seeing as Annie Hall was on the film channel. The second hour was tiresome, I was growing testy at the aching, bored with television, and harder to distract. The third hour was endured by deep breathing, running though Spanish verb patterns in my head as a way of occupying my mind, and mainly due to my relatively high resistance and tolerance for pain. Because yes, after 2 and a bit hours, even a stoic old soldier such as myself really wanted it to be over.

I've wanted another tattoo from the day I got my first one, it's true I guess that it could become an addictive pastime. From the moment my swallow was engraved on my left hip, I loved him. I instantly felt like he was part of me, I still love him now and cannot imagine a time when he was not there, I'd feel less of myself without him. Despite my hankering for another, I'm not one of those people who strolls into a studio on a whim, picks a generic, aesthetically pleasing butterfly from the catalogue and has it branded on my arm for all eternity. My swallow was hand-drawn by the tattoo artist after strict instructions from me and numerous draft attempts, and the same goes for my tigress and her riverside environment. I knew specifically what it should look like, I have been thinking about it for a few months, and I sat with the tattoo artist, Phatty (this is clearly a pseudonym on account of his beer fuelled paunch), for an hour the day before, talking through everything I wanted the tattoo to be. It is also carefully and strategically positioned in a place where if I never want it to be seen, it never has to be.

Now, the day after and a few coats of Bepanthen later, it is beginning the healing process and so doesn't yet look like the final form it will take in a week's time. Regardless of the aching, the redness, the slight swelling, I already, as with my swallow before her, am completely attached to my tiger. With little or no contest from the rest of me that I dissect and criticise and abhor with the zeal of a self-conscious 15 year old girl, this corner of my back is now the unrivalled favourite part of my body. Not to say I didn't have doubts though. I was an hour late for my appointment with Phatty, because for 90 minutes after waking I lay sprawled on my bed running it over and over in my head. When I finally took myself across the street I still didn't know what I was going to do, but then, on taking a look at the finished design in his sketchbook, I immediately hoisted up my t-shirt and asked him to ink me up please.

What I wanted to tell you about though, the reason my new body paint has become it's own blog subject, is the reasons for my hour and a half of doubting. Every time I almost talked myself out of it, it was through fear of what other people would think of me, and nothing to do with what I actually wanted for myself! People, some people, see tattoos as a mark of the lower classes, a branding of the uneducated and unsightly scars divulging tastelessness, cheapness, tacky commonality. What will these people think of me? My Mum and Dad share these opinions, they were unhappy but mercifully accepting and non-communicative about the arrival of Mr Swallow, but Ms Tiger is bigger, and marks a commitment to body art that one small, inconspicuous tattoo experiment did not translate. I hate to disappoint them, and of course care very much what they think of me, I want them to be able to love the body they created with it's new additions as much as they did the day it was born ink-free. The mind they encouraged and cultivated has chosen to express itself on the skin they made and shaped, I hope they appreciate this.

My friends, will of course, on the whole, tell me they like it. But what if when my ears are elsewhere they confidingly share their mutual loathing of it, each too considerate in their keeping it from me? What if people I now meet cast unfair judgements about me on catching a glimpse of it, before even speaking a word to me? Now the most honest and pathetically embarrassing confession of doubt which overwhelmingly featured in those 90 minutes, (because I always promised I would be honest here, even when it traps me in unflattering and vulnerable headlights). What if I begin a relationship somewhere down the line, and fall in love with this person, and what if they decide that they can't see me as a continuing fixture in their life because of their disgust at this picture on my skin? What if there is a time of my life in the future where I lose a shot at something good because some stupid, near-sighted man decides that he doesn't like tattoos, and so doesn't like me? Tragic, Grace, real tragic.

When I was in there, needle working away on my back, and when I looked at myself in the mirror on it's completion, all of these doubts were assuaged. I am not tacky, I am not common, I am not uneducated, it doesn't change who I am, I am entitled to make my own decisions about my body, and I hope I have qualities someone could be drawn to, if they had to be, in spite of my tattoos. Plus, I realised, pulling myself together, I wouldn't date anyone so narrow-minded and pompous to dump me because of a tattoo anyway; thankfully I have higher aspirations for myself and any prospective love interests than this pettiness. It has occurred to me that I waste an awful lot of time worrying about what other people think of me, and I know, with simultaneous comfort and dejection, that I'm not alone in this. For a good part of my 23 years I have said and done things in efforts to please others. It is a telling illustration of my desire for approval, that even now, in defence of my choices, I feel the need to justify my own body to whoever you are that may read this.

But you know what? This tiger pleases ME. I think she is beautiful, and I will be forever glad to have her with me. Because of those fretful 90 minutes of uncertainty when I was still without her, she now represents for me even more than she could have before. She will be a reminder, and a lesson, that sometimes, despite our regard and consideration of others, we have to do things that make us happy, grab it where you can and stand firmly rooted in your own volition. In the end, truth outs, and no one will thank you for being anything less than yourself. This is me, this is my prerogative, this is my tiger... and you can take us or leave us.