If You Give me Dirty Looks for Having Tattoos I’m Going to Have Nice Thoughts About You!
Why? Because I’m not a dirty sailor! That said I don’t wanna judge dirty sailors but that’s another story.
My story starts at age sixteen, 2001 in Victoria Canada at The Tattoo Zoo. I asked the shop if they’d tattoo a sixteen year old. A big guy gave me the up and down and said with a discerning voice, “Gary’s the only one. He’ll be back soon”. I sat down with my mom and waited with the type of excitement anticipation you can only feel as a young teenager. Gary was beautiful. I’m not actually sure if he was… but he had tattoos and said all the right things. He told me that bigger was always better when I’d been squeamish about the size of my ink. I didn’t feel pain. I only felt his young vegan hands touching my back and giving me the one thing I had dreamt about, the forbidden.
I’m disabled and I have to go into Kaiser to get B12 shots and other things almost weekly. I can dress up nice and no one looks at me but in the summer sometimes I dress like myself and it’s like I’m a walking performance artist but the bad kind that no one wants. So more like an extremely obvious prostitute. Today I even got the stink eyes from the nurse who gave me my shot. Walking back to the car I realized I was being negative for thinking so poorly of the people even though there were still people in the parking lot eying me down. I don’t want to be that person anymore.
Last weekend I was taking with a friend and I was horrified that they were under a misconception as to why I got my tattoos. Admittedly when I first got them they were not popular like they are today. My memory around this subject is bad and I was surprised that my body told her the answer without my brain having to dig anything up. When I was a young teenager my dad was dying from cancer and it was not normal. Even for cancer it was a weird situation that’s impossible to describe. I didn’t know what cancer was and no one explained it to me and I was alone. I wouldn’t hug my dad because I thought it was contagious. This is something way more complicated than I can possible put into this blog but the simple point is I felt a pain I couldn’t put into words but I was horrified that life would go on and no one would no how badly I had been hurt. Before the age of twenty is when I got most of my tattoos. I had images stabbed into my flesh because I knew it would never go away. This way whatever the image is people couldn’t say I didn’t feel pain. They’d no I felt the physical pain of the tattoo… and maybe that was a badge of sorts that marked my emotional pain. Because not being able to take it away proves that it was important. I can’t stress enough how invisible I felt and how these tattoos were my way of marking my suffering over my dad’s cancer. So my friend said “I just thought you got them to make yourself ugly so people would leave you alone” I felt a deep disappointment in the world.
The truth is it doesn’t matter. I’ve had some cover-up work because it doesn’t matter what it looks like anymore. The scars will always be there and I can make it a little prettier. That said it hurts extremely bad now. The only time I don’t feel pain from a tattoo is when I’m emotionally hurting on a deep level. If I’m happy it’s torture. I don’t even see myself as someone who has tattoos making it even trickier when the world does have it’s judgmental moments. They are less and less as it’s trendy as hell now. But there are places you can go where you are the freak.
Other places it makes you fit in more so I guess it’s all a game now. When I was seventeen I got my second tattoo in Michigan at a Rainbow Gathering in the woods with a car battery and a sewing needle. It was nice to turn eighteen and have the freedom to have better ink. But looking back its just art. It’s not about anyone else. It’s just for me. The idea of myself with out tattoos makes my tummy hurt. It also has the disadvantage of people asking you “what does that say” or grabbing your arm without consent to look at it.
These days having tattoos is relatively harmless. But I am my own worst enemy. So from now on when people give me bad looks I’m not going to think “old butt-head” I’m going to look at them and think about things I like about them. If I don’t see anything I’ll make it up. I’ll make up a story of their past… because I can’t go on living with the pain I feel from toxic eyes every time I leave my liberal bubble. And it’s no one’s fault. I want to move on from petty thoughts so I have to train my brain not to have them. And today was the last get outta jail free card I get. I know I’ll mess up but not without calling myself out.
