My first tattoo experience

When I got to the tattoo shop, I knew I had picked the right place. Which is funny, cause I had picked it pretty much at random. But, that's how a lot of the best decisions seem to get made. Maybe random isn't the word. Maybe it's intuition, or luck, or "the force."

Whatever it is, it had brought me to TripleXXX Tattoo in Manhattan. I had left work a few hours early because I just couldn't wait any more. It was like I was filled with this fire that would only be quenched when the deed had been done. When whatever internal mystery that was bouncing around me had been brought to the surface, and manifested forever in the form of this tattoo.

I found TripleXXX, like I said, just at random on the internet. I liked all their artists' portfolio work, so I figured if I went for a walk-in, my chances of getting somebody good were near 100%. But the real clincher though, was in a statement on the site from one of the artists. It went something like:

"So get a tattoo, and become what you've always been."

I had been building up steam to go for about a month or two. Ever since after I first moved to New York, and read that news article about how somebody had stolen the hand holding the Keys to Heaven off a statue of St. Peter at the Vatican. Nobody knew who had done it or why. I couldn't get the story out of my head. I wanted to somehow be that person, the one who had stolen the keys to heaven, and gotten away with it.

I'd always talked before that about how I thought tattoos were gross or weird before this. I had actually gone on at great lengths about the subject before. I don't know when that changed or how. I guess it was a gradual change, like the Ice Age. Except taking place over the course of a few weeks, and revealing underneath it all kinds of new landforms. Landforms where I wanted a permanent link to this story that had started to seep into my mind.

But old habits die hard, and some part of me was still resisting the whole idea, was still not sure if this was for me. So I was thinking about it really hard, spending a lot of time with the idea and the feeling. And as frequently occurs during that kind of charged mental state, I happened upon something very random, very appropriate & important. A synchronicity which completely sealed the deal.

I was just sitting on my couch, flipping through the ten or so channels that I get. I stop for a second to look at this immense green landscape shot on some show. I don't know what it is. But I lingered just long enough for the scene to change to someone speaking about the origins of tattooing in New Zealand, with the Maori people.

The documentary delved into how the Maori art originated as moko, a form of carving, which they traditionally did on their dwellings, which told the epic stories of their gods and mythic heroes. And there was this modern Maori tattoo artist who was talking about how for them it still held this spiritual significance. He said something to the effect of:

Other men keep their religious stories in books, like the Bible. But for us, we keep these stories upon our bodies.

So a couple days later I found myself at the shop. The walls were hung with all kinds of awesome crap, from blown up tarot cards of the devil, to statues of Batman standing next to the Virgin Mary, to huge Pacific Northwestern Native American tribal masks, to drawings of dragons rearing up in anger, punctured by a battalion of arrows. Walking into that place was like walking into a room full of everything that I had always been interested in my whole life, religion & super-heroes and monsters, and shit, it was just all there, blended perfectly together. And that said one thing to me. This was the place, these were the people. They knew who I was, and why I was there, and they would be able to help me make it happen. To turn this story, this feeling, this indescribable pattern of energy into something concrete, and in so doing, bring me one step closer to becoming what I had always been to begin with.

The whole thing was very unceremonious, very relaxed. It wasn't some sort of immense shamanic initiation ritual with like incense and drumming and visits to the spirit world and crap. It was just me sitting there in a room with a few other heavily tattooed guys, resting my arm on this thing while my guy, "Needles" did his work. It hurt, but not really. I had prepared myself for the worst, and instead was presented with something altogether indescribable, which went the full range from painful and unpleasant in certain areas, to almost feeling sort of good in others. It was very strange.

I do wonder, like I said, what the psychological effect would be on a person to have tattooing combined with more elaborate life-transition sorts of rituals. I imagine it would be a quite powerful experience, because even without all that other stuff, I could tell that something was changing inside of me. And when I left, my arm wrapped once around with a piece of saran wrap, I felt different. I felt like not only my mind, but my heart and soul had been touched, and forever modified in the process. I walked into the drug store to pick up some bacitracin and Lubiderm for the after-care, and I wondered if the other people there could feel it. Did I seem different to them? I mean, I was a stranger of course, but could they feel in my presence the mysterious energy that had been both released and manifested by this tattoo? Could they see that I had become forever a different person? I felt almost certain they could.

The End

PS. For more info on this tattoo and its personal symbolism, check out my article "Heroes & Hierophants".